


Epoch!

by Pangea



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dinosaurs, Calm Down Erik, Charles Is a Big Dorkface, Dubious Science, Erik is not a Happy Bunny, Honestly Charles What Are You Thinking, M/M, Minor Character Death, Velociraptors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-06
Updated: 2013-09-06
Packaged: 2017-12-25 19:07:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 40,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/956617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pangea/pseuds/Pangea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Erik Lehnsherr decides to answer the sketchy job ad on the very last page of the Classifieds, meeting an insane billionaire who has no concept of reality and troubling memory loss is not at all what he expects. He also doesn't expect to meet Charles Xavier, who might actually be the love of his life if he could ever get around to admitting it to himself.</p><p>He also doesn't expect dinosaurs, but then again, who really <em>does</em> these days?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Late Cretaceous

**Author's Note:**

  * For [keire_ke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/keire_ke/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文 available: [Epoch!新纪元！](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4868846) by [Glacier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glacier/pseuds/Glacier)



> It was absolutely fantastic to work with the lovely **keire_ke** on such a fun prompt! Be sure to check out her master art post [here](http://keire-ke.livejournal.com/230764.html) on LiveJournal and [here](http://keire-ke.tumblr.com/post/60454359471/art-for-epoch-by-pangeasplits-d-when-erik) on Tumblr and give her all kinds of love for her adorable, fabulous art!
> 
> With thanks to **marourin** and **marimo** for convincing me to join the RBB in the first place, **ikeracity** for beta'ing and offering emotional support, as well as **groovyphilia** , **elsian** , **fightingfortheusers** , and all the rest of you from either Skype or Chatango for being my long-suffering sounding boards when I wasn't sure about things. :')
> 
> For those of you unfamiliar with the term, _epoch_ is pronounced exactly the same as _epic_ , and geologically is a subdivision of time longer than an age but shorter than a period. View the geologic time scale [here](http://www.geosociety.org/science/timescale/timescl.pdf) \- and for reference, we live in the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period, in the Cenozoic Era!
> 
> All science for this fic is borrowed directly from the illustrious _Jurassic Park_ movies and under no circumstances is any of it to be tried at home.

 

 

X

 

Sebastian Shaw is a helluva guy with a helluva plan, and he tells himself exactly this every single morning as he gazes at himself in the mirror, fresh out of the shower and ready for one helluva day.

“Sebastian,” he says in the scant few moments before his personal stylist arrives, “you _are_ The Man.”

He’s a big believer in positive reinforcement, especially when it comes to himself and his fabulous hair.  _Dress for success_ is a policy to live by and he’ll swear on it—hence the personal stylist.  It’s all about appearances and since he has approximately all the money in the world, he may as well dress like it.  He likes his luxury.  Is comfortable in it, even.  And he believes that he deserves every last scrap of it.

“And this is why,” he explains with his most winning smile, beaming at himself in the mirror, “I want you to make me some dinosaurs.”

“Actually,” comes the hesitant reply through the tiny speaker of the headset that currently rests on top of his bronze, wavy locks, “that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why of course it does!” Sebastian says, astounded.  One would assume this is because he’s never witnessed someone not immediately bending over backwards to do what he wants, but in reality he’s mostly stumped because his teeth only appear Shockingly White where they should be Blindingly White.  Unacceptable.  He’ll have to tell his PR to make him a dentist appointment.  “I can pay for it, so why shouldn’t I have it?  Is that what’s worrying you?  Never worry about money, dear boy, not when I’m involved.”

“Uh,” says Hank McCoy, which is an outstanding representation of all three doctorate degrees he already has under his belt at the admittedly impressive age of 18.

“Speak up,” Sebastian suggests cheerfully, even as he leans forward to examine his eyebrows carefully, “didn’t quite catch that, lad.”

“It’s not the, um, it’s not about the money,” Hank replies carefully.  Interestingly enough his mannerisms directly reflect the behavior of someone attempting to approach a rabid animal with nothing but some lint and a paperclip in one pocket—that is to say, he’s fighting every ingrained instinct in his body to not hang up the phone and run screaming in the opposite direction. 

This is actually only made possible by the fact that unlike someone attempting to approach a rabid animal with nothing but some lint and a paperclip in one pocket, Hank has something else: pure, undiluted desperation.

“If it’s not about the money then what exactly _is_ the problem?” Sebastian asks, a small dash of annoyance slowly beginning to permeate his voice.  As far as he’s ever been concerned, there is no such thing as a _problem_ , let alone multiple ones.  Money solves everything, what are they teaching kids these days?

“It’s just that, well, I’m not sure that dinosaurs can just be recreated out of nothing,” Hank says in the tone of someone waiting for a bomb to drop.  Sebastian would know, he’s familiar with this kind of tone enough to recognize it, if only because he literally _is_ a walking bomb that could drop at any second.

Honestly, though, bombs and bomb threats, for that matter, are _so_ 1962.  He mostly uses his nifty mutation to keep himself looking young.  Take that, plastic surgeons.

“Well of course you won’t have _nothing_ ,” Sebastian says dismissively, leaning so far forward that he’s in danger of pressing his nose against the glass.  Ugh, his pores are huge.  He makes a mental note to spend at least three hours lounging at the side of his Olympic-sized pool this afternoon to soak up some glorious radiation.  “You’ll have an entire state-of-the-art laboratory, son.  Top of the line equipment, no expense spared.  I’m being quite serious when I say I want dinosaurs, Dr. McCoy, and you’ll find me quite willing to make this process as smooth, fast, and easy as possible.”

Hank makes a small distressed sound, possibly because Sebastian has just dangled the opportunity of his measly life in front of him on an extra-sugar-coated candyfloss string, or possibly because he’s just checked his mail and has found six bills stamped with large letters that spell OVERDUE.

“I-I’m interested in the project, of course, sir,” he says quickly, “I’m just, ah, uncertain about the success of your—our endeavors, I mean, with no dinosaur DNA to work with, I’m not sure—”

“DNA?” Sebastian interrupts, leaning away from the mirror with a small frown.  He’s heard of it.  Supposedly it’s responsible for his mutation.  In his mind it’s translated to some people are built better than others, and he is built best of all.  “You mean something like blood, correct?  Can’t you just, I don’t know, find a mosquito that’s been preserved in fossilized amber for 65 million years and extract the red blood cells in its gut that most likely came from a dinosaur?”

“That’s oddly specific,” Hank sputters, and Sebastian allows himself a smirk.  Now he’s only allowed four more today; he looks good when he smirks but even he will admit that he looks _too_ good so he tries to ration them.  Don’t want to wear them out.

“I _have_ put some thought into this, son,” he admonishes gently.  If he were a father figure, he’d be shaking his head knowingly in wise amusement.  “So you’ll do it?”

“The DNA won’t be complete, it will need to be sequenced, which will take time, and then we’ll have to find something compatible to splice it with and run tests,” Hank is babbling, but it’s less cautious protests and more brilliant-minded scientist thinking aloud and hook, line, and sinker, Sebastian’s got him now, “but yes, of course, yes—”

“Wonderful!” Sebastian interrupts him cheerfully with another award-winning wide smile (1989, 1990, and 1992 National Best Smile Champion, and he’s still sore about 1991).  “I look forward to what you’ll come up with for me, Dr. McCoy.  The money’s already been wired, and my people will be in touch to help set you up and get you started.  Ciao!”

He hangs up on more of Hank’s sputtering, congratulates himself on once again securing that he’ll get exactly what he wants, and then his stylist arrives and Sebastian promptly forgets about the whole thing for exactly twenty years.

 

X

 

Erik Lehnsherr’s likes, in no particular order, are as follows: his mutant ability, his mother, driving fast and furiously, and strawberry ice cream with chocolate chips.

His dislikes, in no particular order, are: everything else.

That’s not to say he isn’t enjoying his current view which consists of a lot of tweed, floppy brown hair that curls slightly at the end, obscene red lips that practically glisten due to the fact that a pink tongue keeps darting out from in between them to lick every few minutes, and that’s not to forget the stunning blue eyes—that is, when he can actually see them from over the top of the thick novel currently blocking his view.  _Game of Thrones_ , the spine reads, visible through neat, tidy fingers.  Erik’s heard of it.  May even be interested enough in asking about it as a conversation starter, if a conversation was something he actually desired.

The harsh racket of the helicopter’s whirling rotor blades is somewhat dimmed inside the pristine inner cabin, so it’s quiet enough for Erik to hear the soft snort emitted from behind the pages.  It’s also quiet enough to hear the snores coming from the third occupant of the slightly cramped space, passed out cold against the tiny window.

Erik wishes that there was an inflight movie.  An inflight beverage.  Or some way for him to get up and stretch his legs before they fall off.

 _Game of Thrones_ is suddenly lowered, flopping down to rest on trim thighs.  Not that Erik’s looking or anything.  “Would you like to borrow a book?” the red lips say, and Erik is a little bit mesmerized by how each word is formed with that delicate, cultured accent, “I’m reading the second one here, but I’ve still got the first one with me.”  The lips quirk in a friendly smile, and Erik takes a brief moment to wonder if they happen to be the direct cause of global warming because he feels a large frozen chunk of ice around his heart suddenly break off and crash down into the sea of Human Emotion at the sight alone.

He realizes belatedly that he’s staring, so he blinks rapidly and recovers enough to reply gruffly, “Doesn’t everyone die in those?”

The red lips purse thoughtfully.  At this point Erik might start to sweat.  “Well, quite a few people do, yes.  But there are plenty of characters to go through.”

“That’s morbid,” Erik says before he can stop himself.  What is he doing?  It’s almost like he’s actually encouraging conversation.  This is practically unheard of in the Erik Lehnsherr Book of Human Relations.

The blue eyes are shining in amusement.  “No, my friend, that’s _Game of Thrones_.”

Erik swallows, somewhat at a loss.  Fortunately he’s saved from having to come up with a semi-intelligent reply by their third companion giving a particularly loud snore and drooling a bit on the glass.  Erik exchanges a look with Blue Eyes and they end up laughing when they realize that their expressions are identical in the sense that they’re both thinking _what the fuck_.

“Sorry,” the other man chuckles, hiding his face in his book for a moment, and goddamn it, no, Erik is not kind-of-sort-of-definitely falling for someone who still acts like a third grader, “that’s my fault, I’m afraid.”

“What,” says Erik loquaciously.

He flushes.  It’s lovely.  Erik might want to die, or just hold him down explicitly to find out just how far that dust of pink extends.  “Well, I’m a telepath.  I might’ve, um, encouraged Mr. Shaw to fall asleep shortly after takeoff.”

Erik stares at him.

“I normally don’t interfere with minds at all,” he explains, still adorably pink, “but he was all geared up to talk our ears off the entire flight and I just…”  He trails off, embarrassed.

Oh, right.  Telepath.  Erik has known this since before takeoff, when he accidentally almost sat on him.  In Erik’s defense, the tweed of his jacket is very similar to the pattern of the seat fabric, and he’d been a little distracted by Shaw blabbering at eight million miles an hour.  Maybe Blue Eyes’ second mutation is camouflage.  Regardless, Erik had been just about to drop down into the seat when he’d received a very sharp shock directly to the brain, which had caused him to give a very unmanly yelp and knock his head against the roof of the cabin.

All parties involved had been mortified, Erik because he hadn’t even been aware that a sound like that could come out of his own mouth, and Blue Eyes because “oh my god I’m so sorry, it was an instinctive defense and I didn’t mean to hurt you,” while Shaw missed the entire ordeal on the account that he was still describing in acute detail how he lost the 1991 National Best Smile Championship by one point.

“Thank god,” Erik says dryly, but not without feeling.  He’s since recovered from that episode of Things He Did Not Know About Himself, and Blue Eyes has been hiding behind his book ever since Shaw had mysteriously conked out against the window as soon as his ass touched the seat cushion.

“You really don’t mind?”  _Game of Thrones_ is closed entirely and tossed onto an empty seat, and those blue eyes peer at him inquisitively.  Erik suspects that this is how an amoeba would feel shortly after being dumped on a microscope slide and honed in on by one giant eye if it had more than one cell to process all of that.  How unsettling.

“What,” says Erik again, actively demonstrating his above average IQ.

“That I, you know—” He raises a hand and wiggles his fingers next to his right temple.  Erik is apparently meant to take this as sign language for _telepathy_.

Erik snorts.  “No.  As far as I’m concerned, putting him to sleep benefits us both.”

Blue Eyes grins.  It has a way of lighting up his entire face which gives off the impression that he could potentially serve as his own power and-or light source.  Someone ought to be harvesting that.  Wake up America.  “So, I assume that you’re a recently-hired employee as well?”

“Yes.”  Erik shrugs.  Mind-reader or not, it’s not a hard guess to make.  Why else would he be on the cramped helicopter?  “I’m told my mutation will be helpful in operating animatronic dinosaurs.”

“Oh, you must be Erik!”  Now even his eyes are lit up, and Erik is considering asking if he can charge his iPhone.  It’s already down to 47% because of all the Angry Birds he’d been playing earlier so a good charging wouldn’t go amiss.  “Mr. Shaw told me about you, we’ll be working together!”  He holds out a hand.  “Charles Xavier.”

“Did he tell you specifically, or did you lift that from his mind?” Erik asks wryly, just to watch him turn pink again.  Erik’s never had a problem with the color pink—strawberry ice cream is pink, after all—but it’s slowly edging its way up into his List of Likes, which is something that has not been altered since its creation in 1997.

“I might’ve done some snooping,” Xavier admits sheepishly as they shake hands.  His skin is soft and without calluses, but his grip is warm and firm, his hand fitting perfectly into Erik’s like it was meant to be there.  Erik is not a believer in things like destiny, but.

Actually, he’s not even sure where he’s going with that.

“So if we’re to work together,” Erik says even as he belatedly realizes that they’re still holding hands and quickly withdraws, “how exactly does a telepath help a metallokinetic move giant, fake dinosaurs?”

“My focus will be on the people watching them,” Xavier says brightly, “I’m supposed to just tweak their perceptions a little and make them believe that they’re looking at _real_ dinosaurs.”

“Who the hell would even believe that there’s such thing as real dinosaurs in the first place?” Erik asks dubiously, shooting a glance in Shaw’s direction.

“I’m not sure,” Xavier admits with a rueful smile, “good thing we’re not going to be in marketing.”

“So much for not interfering in other people’s minds, though,” Erik says bluntly.  It’s a talent of his.  He can switch from razor sharp to coldly blunt in the same amount of time it takes to flick a switchblade shut.  His mother has pointed out to him countless times that this is why he has no friends, to which he can only reply that that is rather the point, Mama, now will you please pass the knishes.

True to his professorial-appearing form (it’s the tweed), Xavier looks like he can probably launch into a lecture that lasts one full work day about the grey area of telepathic ethics, but to Erik’s mild surprise he settles for saying, “What I’ll be doing is relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things, don’t you think?  I’ll only be helping them enjoy themselves.”

Erik considers arguing for the sake of arguing.  He will openly admit to himself that Xavier is one fine piece while he’s smiling and blinking innocently—just because he doesn’t like people doesn’t mean he’s incapable of recognizing inherent attractiveness—so Erik can only imagine what Xavier looks like when he’s fired up and passionately defending himself and his controversial mutation.  Erik likes to argue.  Xavier looks like he can probably argue for a living.

On the other hand, Erik also resides on what can be politely called the Pro-Mutant, less politely the Radical Extremist, and impolitely the Fucking Zealot side of the How Do You Feel About Mutants spectrum, so he’s all for sticking together in the face of ignorant baselines who constantly argue about how dangerous the Mutant Menaces are.  Xavier can read and alter minds.  Big deal.  Erik can crush a skyscraper like a cola can and also find his keys.

Everything is very relative, anyway, in the end.

Judging by Xavier’s small, conspiratorial grin, he’s heard most of that.  Erik calmly buries his other line of thought which involves both of them minus clothing before Xavier can start getting the wrong idea.

“We’re ten minutes out,” the pilot says over the crackling intercom.  Erik tries looking out of his own tiny round window but all he can see is open ocean.  Supposedly there’s an island out here somewhere.  Erik reserves the right to remain skeptical.

“I should probably wake him up again,” Xavier says reluctantly, indicating Shaw with a nod.

“Do you have to,” Erik says with a straight face.

Xavier laughs, grinning, and then like flicking a switch he abruptly becomes serious as he brings two fingers up to his temple in concentration.  Erik watches him without outright staring, or at least makes an attempt not to appear as if he’s mentally cataloging every last visible freckle while imagining where all the rest could be under that ridiculous tweed.

Sebastian Shaw abruptly sits up and wipes the drool off his chin without actually noticing.  “Ah, wonderful, we’re almost there!”  His exuberance makes the cabin feel five times smaller than it already is, casually defiant in the face of physics.  “I suppose I’ll give you boys my little spiel, shall I?”

Xavier nods encouragingly, politely interested.  Erik is equally polite in the sense that he refrains from ripping open the cabin’s hatch and bodily tossing the man out.

You need this job, he reminds himself.  An income would be nice.  And you would also kind of like to suck Charles’ cock, an event which would probably be made complicated with any pending murder allegations.

“In 1993,” Shaw begins, oblivious to the complicated whirlwind inside Erik’s head that’s going along the lines of _since when is Xavier now Charles_ , “I had a dream.”

He’s also evidently oblivious to the way Erik’s thoughts come crashing to a grinding halt at the overly-dramatic delivery of a line that has remotely no business coming out of his mouth.  Charles sends him a sympathetic glance in commiseration and while it’s nice to not be alone in _what the fuck_ , oh god does that mean Charles heard all the other things before that.

“I had a dream that dinosaurs would once again walk the earth beside mankind,” Shaw continues brazenly, and Erik is forced to concede a few points for sheer bloody-mindedness, “and back then, I had the money to make that possible.”  He stops and looks at them.

“Oh,” Charles says belatedly, “impressive.”

“I hired a brilliant young mind by the name of Dr. Henry McCoy, and charged him with the task of bringing my dream to life,” Shaw continues, apparently satisfied by that meager response, “because my main goal was to open up a theme park beyond anyone’s wildest dreams—an entire island of live dinosaurs on display for all the world to see.  Unfortunately, back then I had a lot of projects going on and I feel silly admitting this, but the entire thing slipped my mind.”

Erik wonders at the novelty of being incredibly rich and exponentially more insane that hiring someone to create dinosaurs for you is easily forgotten.

Shaw heaves a sigh.  “And then before I knew it, years had passed, and I lost quite a bit when the market went to hell—such is life, eh?—and I was forced to give up many things.”  He pauses again for dramatic effect and the silence is so thick that Erik could slice it and serve it on a dessert plate with whipped cream.  “Fortunately, those days are long behind me.  I’ve slowly been making a comeback, and this new revised version of my dream is going to help me get back on my feet.”

Erik is suddenly hyperaware of how he’s sitting in a private helicopter on the way to a private island that’s scheduled to become a theme park, all owned by a man who believes he’s currently down on his luck.  Across from him, Charles must be coming to a similar realization because for a moment he looks like he’s swallowed an unexpected cumshot.

Erik may or may not need to get cocksucking off his mind.

“Fortunately, I’ve learned a great deal of things in the past twenty years, and I’ve had some sense instilled in me,” Shaw says with a chuckle that Erik and Charles are clearly meant to share in but neither of them do, “and I know now that hiring someone to recreate dinosaurs is a little misguided, not to mention far-fetched.  We’ll still have a dino theme park, make no mistake, but only the animatronic kind, which is where you two fine gentlemen come in.”  He beams at them.

“How inspiring,” Charles says, lying through his teeth in such a way that even a small child would be able to call him on his bullshit.

“Isn’t it?” Shaw agrees happily.

Erik considers throwing _himself_ out of the helicopter.

(Un)fortunately the thought is cut short by the pilot announcing their impending landing, and for the first time in over two hours Erik can finally see something out the window besides water and sky.  _Something_ turns out to be a wild, lush jungle, stretched out across the broad, gentle slope of what is probably a shield volcano, rising up out of the ocean in the middle of nowhere.  Waves crash against rocky cliffs, sending up spray hundreds of feet into the air, and the helicopter wobbles a little as it carefully hovers into a landing, lurching back and forth before finally setting down with a thump.

“How big is this place?” Charles wonders.

“Three by five miles,” Shaw answers him, delighted to have more to talk about.  “I haven’t named it yet, but that’ll be something to consider once we get the park up and running!”

The helicopter pilot hops out of the front and opens up the main hatch of the cabin.  They’re immediately swamped by humidity, sloshing in like murky lagoon water and for a moment Erik struggles to breathe, unsure if he’s actually underwater or not.  Charles must be dying in that suit.

Nevertheless, Erik is the first to push his way out of the helicopter, instinctively ducking to avoid decapitating himself as he jogs out from underneath the whirling blades.  His shirt is already sticking to his skin and overhead the sun beats down relentlessly in the cloudless sky, the glare reflecting harshly off the waves of the ocean.  He’s already inclined to hate it.

“And welcome ashore!” Shaw says as he and Charles catch up to where Erik stands.  Behind them, the helicopter is already taking off with a huge downdraft of air, buffeting them with gusts for a few moments before climbing higher into the sky, turning to head back to the mainland.

Erik distinctly thinks of the large jaws of a trap snapping shut.

A jeep waits on the edge of the foliage, striped with neon orange and lime green in the same kind of way all home decorating television programs tell you explicitly not to do.  To highlight the garish color scheme further, a towering mutant with thick, bright blue fur stands beside the open driver’s side door, and for a moment Erik wonders if he’s stepped onto the Isle of Dr. Seuss instead.

Charles actually elbows him for that one and what the hell, Erik wasn’t aware that their acquaintance has moved into the comfortable territory of being able to rudely elbow each other in the gut.

 _Be nice_ , Charles thinks at him, dropping each crisp syllable neatly into Erik’s brain, _he’s sensitive about his appearance around others_.

“Welcome, Mr. Shaw,” says the mutant, speaking carefully through large frontal canines, “we’ve been looking forward to your arrival.”

“Henry!”  Shaw bounds forward and shakes his hand enthusiastically.  “So nice to finally meet you in person!  Gentlemen, this is Dr. Henry McCoy.  Dr. McCoy, may I present Erik Lehnsherr and Charles Xavier, our two newest team members.”

They exchange more handshakes and pile into the jeep, McCoy driving while Shaw claims the front passenger seat, so Erik is forced to fold himself into the back.  On the plus side, he gets to sit beside Charles, who happens to fit better than Erik does, and the fact that McCoy has the air conditioning on full, icy blast is literally a gift from above.

“Did my shipment come in?” Shaw asks as the jeep trundles along a winding, dirt road through the jungle.  It’s a bouncy ride and everything around them is alarmingly green, even without counting the vibrant lime of the jeep.  Erik finds himself looking up through the sunroof at the bits of blue sky visible here and there through the canopy overhead just to give his eyes a little variety.

“Yes,” McCoy confirms, but he sounds a little hesitant.  “Though we’re not sure what you wanted to do with all those robotic dinosaurs—I was thinking that they might go well in the museum, I suppose?”

“The museum?” Shaw barks out an incredulous laugh.  “The museum only needs fossils and bones, the dinosaurs are going to be the main attraction!  We need to set them up around the island inside enclosures to make them seem as real as possible!”

McCoy frowns.  “What purpose would that serve?  The real ones will be sufficient enough, I think.”

Erik experiences a rare moment of kinship with Sebastian Shaw in which they both gape at McCoy, unsure if they’ve heard him properly.  He said _real ones_ , as in _real dinosaurs_ , right?  Even Charles is eyeing the young scientist a little warily.

To no one’s surprise, Shaw recovers the power of speech first.  “My dear Henry, that’s impossible.  Dinosaurs have been extinct for centuries—”

“65 million years, actually,” McCoy interrupts him calmly, “until now.  Mr. Shaw, you hired me to make you some dinosaurs, so that’s what I did.  Have you been listening to _any_ of my voicemails?”

“No, but—”

Whatever it is that Sebastian Shaw was about to say next is swallowed up into nothing as the jeep reaches the edge of the trees, driving out into an enormous, open field.  Maybe he finishes the sentence.  Maybe he doesn’t.

Erik will never know, because at the moment he’s unable to process anything else besides the sight of a towering monster with legs thicker than tree trunks and a neck stretching longer than a giraffe’s, every slow, steady step it takes shaking the ground with reverberating finality.

A real, live dinosaur.


	2. Paleocene

 

X

Charles Francis Xavier knows a lot of things.  For instance, he knows the first two hundred digits of pi and can recite them from memory, and he knows quite a bit about the human genome.  He knows that the estimated age of the Universe is 13.9 billion years old, while Earth is only 4.6 billion years old, and the ground he stands on was once part of a supercontinent called Pangea, which formed only 300 million years ago.  He knows, contrary to popular belief, how to do his own laundry, and he definitely knows that Erik Lehnsherr is a hot piece of ass.

He also knows that dinosaurs have been extinct for 65 million years, a fact very near and dear to his heart ever since the tender age of six, when he’d once stood in the front of his kindergarten class for show-and-tell, clutching his stuffed Ankylosaurus tightly to his chest and proclaiming, “When I grow up, I want to be a _dinosaur_.”

His teacher had let him down gently, but if he’s honest, he’s been disappointed ever since.

All of this, however, flies right out of his head now that he finds himself staring up at what appears to be a living, breathing Brachiosaurus casually munching on the leaves at the top of a tree.  Hank drives the jeep up a little closer, still keeping about fifty yards away before stopping the car, allowing them all to stare up through the front window and the sunroof overhead at the miracle in front of them.

Charles reaches over absently for the door handle, never tearing his eyes away from the sight in front of him, fumbling blindly for a moment before managing to open the door.  He stumbles out of the jeep sideways, ignoring Hank’s protest and half-aware of Erik jumping out on the other side, and then he’s walking forward through the knee-high grass, craning his neck back to look up the long length of the Brachiosaurus’ neck as it stretches to reach more leaves.

He comes to a stop when he’s nearly halfway between the dinosaur and the jeep, still gazing up in wonder.  Erik stands beside him, and he says, quite to the point, “Charles, that’s a dinosaur.”  His delightfully prickly mind has gone smooth and flat with shock.

Charles laughs a little.  “Yes, it is, isn’t it?” he says weakly.  He laughs again, incredulous, because _oh my god_.  “It’s a dinosaur.  A _dinosaur_!”

Erik looks over at him and Charles looks back and in this incredible moment of joint discovery Charles feels like he’s known Erik for ages instead of a little over a couple hours, just by their identical expressions of sheer marvel.  It’s like they’ve discovered aliens.  Except, Charles thinks with a grin that threatens to crack his face in half, what could be more natural to planet Earth than a dinosaur?

“Fantastic, isn’t she?”  Hank and Shaw have joined them, and the scientist has more than a little bit of pride in his voice.  Were their positions reversed, Charles imagines that he would be calmly shouting his discoveries from the top of every mountain covering the face of the planet and at least 75% of the tops of all buildings in every major city.

“She’s beautiful,” Charles says with feeling, gazing up again.  The Brachiosaurus tears off a huge chunk of leaves, some of them fluttering down to the ground far below.  “Hank, how—how did you _do_ this?”

“Well, when Mr. Shaw hired me twenty years ago, he came up with the basic idea himself,” Hank admits.  “I thought it could never be done, but I took red blood cells from mosquitos found in amber—fossilized tree sap.  Using those cells, I was able to extract dinosaur DNA and begin to sequence it.”  He rubs the back of his head.  “That took about a year just to get things straight.”

“Wouldn’t there be gaps?” Charles asks immediately with all the tact of a crocodile pulling an unsuspecting zebra into the Nile.

Hank blinks in a very accurate representation of how a zebra in that exact circumstance would react, given that it would only have about half of a second before its face was bitten off.  He recovers admirably and says, “Yes, there were quite a few gaps in the sequence.  But I was able to fill them by taking frog DNA and splicing it with the dino DNA.  Problem solved.”

Charles can practically feel himself going gooey-eyed over all the possible ramifications of what Hank has achieved here on this barrier island.  “And to grow them?”

“All of them were hatched from eggs, just like actual dinosaurs,” Hank says, pride creeping back into his voice.  The zebra prances across the backs of crocodiles instead, nose in the air.  “I was able to insert the spliced DNA into crocodile ova and create an embryo, which I put inside special, synthetic plastic eggs with large yolk sacs and a little bit of water.  After that all it took was a week or so of incubation, and then, well.”  He grins up at the Brachiosaurus.  “You can see the results yourself.”

“Hank,” Charles says with all the heartfelt passion of a thousand shimmering suns, “this is _incredible_.”  He may even be tearing up.  Dinosaurs.  Real, live dinosaurs walking the face of the earth again for the first time in 65 million years, and here he is as one of the very first witnesses.  He compares the feeling to that of a crocodile watching a zebra prance across the backs of its fellows and finds that it is both confusing and awesome.

“It is,” Hank agrees with a dopey smile, “it really is, isn’t it?”

“Shit,” Erik agrees fervently, summing it all up in one concise word with his eyebrows raised.  He’s looking between the two of them like they’ve grown extra heads and Charles resists the urge to laugh.  It may be altogether possible to grow an extra head now, with the leaps and bounds Hank has been making by himself in the past twenty years.

It may be that that isn’t exactly the point.

“I am in awe,” Shaw declares, coming out of whatever dinosaur-induced trance he’d fallen into—well, that explains why it’d been so quiet.  “Never in all my wildest imaginings would I have ever thought this to be possible—”

 _Well he did at one point_ , Erik thinks very loudly, his mental voice dry as dust, _if he hired Hank to do this in the first place.  Just his luck that he hired someone who actually did it._

Charles has to cough in order to cover up his grin, unable to stop himself.

“—and now, here I stand on the cusp of something magnificent,” Shaw continues, blissfully ignorant, “and I find myself speechless.”  He shakes Hank’s hand vigorously, practically vibrating with excitement.  “Dr. McCoy, you have utterly exceeded my expectations.”

“There’s more where this came from,” Hank promises, “there’s a lot to show you.”

“Do lead the way, my dear man!”

Shaw and Hank make their way back to the jeep, Shaw chattering excitedly with Hank trying his best to keep up.  Charles lingers a moment longer, looking up at the Brachiosaurus as it starts in on a new branch.

“Well, I guess we’re out of a job, with this new development.” Erik says beside him.  “Who would’ve thought.  We’ve been outsourced for dinosaurs.”

“I suppose so,” Charles laughs, “but I can’t bring myself to be too upset.  I mean.  _Look_ at this.”  He gestures at the dinosaur vaguely.

Erik regards him in quiet amusement, the sharp contours of his regard from his prickly mind dragging gently across Charles’ skin like fingernails, nearly tangible, and Charles almost shivers.  He opens his mouth to say something, despite the fact that his mind has gone quite blank, and fortunately he’s interrupted by the honk of the jeep.

“Let’s carry on, gentlemen!”  Shaw’s head and half of his torso stick up out of the jeep’s sunroof and he waves at them impatiently.

“Do you think we could roll the window shut on him,” Erik muses aloud and Charles snorts, earning himself a quick crocodile grin with far too many teeth, mostly ideal for ripping off the faces of zebras but right now Charles finds himself utterly charmed.  Who knew.

Charles ends up lingering a few scant moments longer as Erik heads for the jeep, gazing up at the Brachiosaurus as it continues to graze, ignoring all the tiny humans or just plain unaware of them entirely.  Charles could probably turn this observation into a winding simile or even a fancy metaphor about how tiny and insignificant human beings are, in the grand scheme of things through the long march of time, but he thinks that really the Brachiosaurus is just hungry and is enjoying what are some damn good leaves.

He gets honked at again, which honestly, what if the sound causes the fifty-foot-long dinosaur in front of them to startle and trample them all to death?  He has absolutely no intentions of being flattened to a pancake, he thinks matter-of-factly as he turns on his heel and marches back towards the jeep.

At least, he amends thoughtfully, not until he’s sucked Erik’s cock.  Once.

Maybe twice.

 

X

 

_"When I grow up, I want to be a **dinosaur**."_

 

X

 

It takes Erik six point five seconds of knowing Logan Howlett to decide that the man is a Menace, capital M, because it takes Logan exactly that long to secure himself at the very top of Erik’s formerly nonnumeric List of Dislikes.

It goes something like this:

“Hello,” Charles says, the actual epitome of polite with his picture next to the word in the dictionary as he sticks out his hand, “I’m Charles Xavier.”

“Erik Lehnsherr,” Erik adds, because he’s trying out this new thing where he casually tries to appear like he’s a friendly guy.  Potential date material.  Someone who Charles Xavier would consider sleeping with.  Etcetera.

“Go fuck yourselves,” says the furry little asshole without even turning around.

Erik’s first, instinctual response is to think _yes please_ followed shortly by _oh shit did Charles hear that_ , which is alarmingly starting to become a norm, and then finally his temper kicks in with _who the fuck is this dick._

“This is Logan Howlett,” McCoy explains helpfully, catching up to them where they stand at the base of a very large steel wall two seconds too late and missing the entire exchange.  “Expert hunter and trapper, but I mostly hired him to keep some measure of control over our Velociraptor tank.”

“Velociraptor _tank_?” Charles asks with the same level of feverish excitement most children exhibit upon stepping into a candy shop for the first time as he gazes up at the thirty-foot-tall wall.

“ _Velociraptor_ tank?” Erik asks, putting emphasis on the real issue here.  Priorities, people.

“You bred Velociraptors?” Shaw asks, sounding far too delighted for a man whose money has been spent on the creation of what are probably terrifying man-eaters.

“Of course,” McCoy says, sounding like he might be insulted by the assumption that he _hadn’t_ bred terrifying man-eaters.  “We’ve also got a couple of full-grown Rexes who have territory on the northeast tip of the island.”

“Rexes as in T-rexes?” Erik demands.  “As in _Tyrannosaurus rexes_?”

“As in does he have to fucking spell it out?” Logan shoots back over his shoulder, starting up the staircase hammered onto the side of the wall.

Erik manages to ignore the hairy wombat this time in favor of staring at Hank.  “Why did it _ever_ seem like a good idea to grow Tyrannosaurus rexes?”

“It’s a dinosaur park!” Shaw says, practically skipping up the stairs after Logan.  “What would a dinosaur park be without a T-rex?”  He gasps theatrically and Erik glances around suspiciously, looking for TV cameras in case they’re being filmed and Shaw is going for an Oscar.  “I could call it Jurassic Park!”

“That’s silly,” Charles says at once, climbing after him, “Tyrannosaurus rex lived in the upper Cretaceous Period, which was long after the Jurassic Period.”

 _Silly_ , Erik thinks.  That isn’t the word he’d choose, but it’s good enough—it’s _silly_ that they’re willingly standing here on an isolated island inhabited by the most vicious carnivores ever to walk the face of the planet.  Dinosaurs, yes, hooray; but there’s a large difference between standing next to a dinosaur that ignores you in favor of leaves for lunch and a dinosaur that will likely look at you as the main course of lunch.  Erik does not want to be lunch.

“Are you coming up, Erik?” Charles calls down to him hopefully.

Erik blinks and realizes that he’s still standing on the ground while Logan and Shaw have already reached the top of the wall and Charles is halfway up, peering down at him.  “Coming,” Erik says gruffly as he begins to climb.  A small, juvenile part of him that indulges in wishful thinking silently tacks on _inside you_.

He covers this up by thinking loudly about how hungry he is.  For lunch.

Charles waits for him, beaming.  “I think Hank intends for this to be our last stop before we finally head on to the main building and his lab,” he says when Erik draws closer, “I’m almost certain lunch will be involved once we get there.”

“Great,” Erik says, forcing a smile.  All this smiling is starting to hurt his face.  It can’t actually be healthy.

“You don’t have to worry about the T-rexes, too, you know,” Charles says as they climb up the rest of the way, “I doubt we’ll even see them.  Before Logan interrupted, Hank was going to explain he’s observed that the Rexes are very protective of the territory they’ve established, and probably won’t ever venture outside of it.  As long as we don’t bother them, they won’t bother us.”

“Shaw still seriously wants to bring people here?” Erik mutters.  He’s heard of a lot of Bad Ideas throughout his life, even had a few himself, but this one has to rank in the top three—right up there with stop signs and no dental insurance.

Charles tilts his head thoughtfully, which probably means he’s casually dipping into Shaw’s head.  It’s sort of adorable how he’s slightly out of breath from the climb, panting lightly as they finally reach the top of the wall.  “He seems quite serious, yes.  He’s already designing a visitor’s center in his head.  Very grand.”

Erik snorts.  “People are going to get eaten,” he says flatly and with the same kind of inevitability a certain meteor had as it hurtled towards Earth approximately 65 million years ago.

Charles’ lips quirk upwards in a small smile of amusement.  “Well it’s not as if you’d actually care.”

“Oh my god,” says Erik as the words hit him, much like that same certain meteor careening into Earth, “you’re right.”

“You want to watch or not?” Logan demands, forcibly breaking into the private world of two they’d established in which Erik monopolizes every last iota of Charles’ attention.  This guy is _really_ getting on Erik’s nerves.

“What are we watching?” Charles asks brightly, stepping over to the platform where Logan, Hank, and Shaw stand.  With no small trepidation, Erik follows him.

The things he’ll do for the D.

“I thought you all might like to observe how we feed the Raptors,” Hank says as they gather close to the edge.  “There’s not much to watch, exactly, but, uh…you’ll see what I mean.”

There’s not much to see period.  The wall they stand on is part of a huge, square enclosure that is covered by a large grate made out of what feels like heavy steel to Erik, and is held up by thick, strong support beams.  Beneath the grate, all that’s visible are the vibrant green fronds of eureka palms, growing so close together that even the ground is out of sight.  Velociraptor tank indeed.

“How many are in there?” Shaw asks as Logan works a control panel on the edge of the platform, opening up a section of the grate slowly with a loud grinding sound.

“By our estimates, at least fifteen,” Hank replies instantly, but then visibly hesitates.  “There are probably more scattered across the rest of the island, though.”

“What,” says Erik flatly.

“What’s the purpose of having the tank, then?” Charles asks curiously.  “Controlled group study?”

“Actually, it was supposed to contain all of the Velociraptors together in one place, so they weren’t loose,” Hank says, and at least has the decency to sound apologetic.  “But two years ago, back before we had the roof on the tank that you see now, some of them actually managed to jump up the palms and jump over the wall entirely.”

“Fascinating,” Charles breathes, eyes alight, “they were actively seeking freedom.”

“They’re intelligent bastards,” Logan says in a low growl, toggling a control stick on the panel.  As they all watch, a heavy-duty crane arm lifts a full-grown cow up into the air, strapped in a harness.  “They carried off one of our guys with them when they escaped.  He was annoying as hell, but still.  Never found his remains.  And just last week we had one trying to climb the crane to get out.  Gotta have constant vigilance around here.”

The cow _moos_ uneasily as it’s slowly lowered down into the green branches of the palms.  It disappears entirely, hidden by the fronds, and Erik isn’t sure if he’s relieved or not.  He’s all about survival of the fittest—homo _superior_ , anyone?—and it’s not a hard call to make between a lone cow and a pack of viciously intelligent carnivores, but that doesn’t mean he wants to _watch_.

The crane stops, presumably because the cow has reached the ground.  There’s an eerie moment of silence.  The breeze rustles lightly through the palm fronds and ruffles Charles’ hair.  Wonderful.  A drop of sweat rolls all the way down Erik’s spine.  Disgusting.

Erik fidgets a little, looking down at the trees below.  He wonders if Hank and Logan are just screwing around with them.  It’d be crazy to knowingly recreate things like Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptors, right?  Who even _wants_ that?  It has to be a joke.  This island is probably filled with a few more long-neck dinosaurs and maybe a Triceratops or two.

Without warning a high-pitched shriek emits from beneath the fronds, all the trees rustling wildly beneath the distinct sound of ripping flesh.  The crane arm sways wildly, creaking so loudly that Erik grips its bearings tightly with his powers in case it’s ripped in half, struggling at first to hold it before gritting his teeth and clamping down on it tighter.  It’s all over in a matter of seconds, the silence abrupt as the initial screech, the crane arm falling still and only the soft rustling of the pond fronds the only indication that the definitely-real Velociraptors have gone.

Logan withdraws the crane from the tank, and the harness that once held the cow is ripped and torn and splattered with blood and guts, hanging unevenly but at least sans any Velociraptor passengers.  The heavy grate slides shut again once the crane is clear, shutting the Raptors back inside.

“Incredible,” Charles remarks, staring up at the mutilated harness, “that only took _seconds_ and there’s barely anything left!”

“Right,” Erik agrees, “so how many of those things got out, did you say?”

“Well,” Hank begins nervously, “we’re not entirely sure of an exact number but—”

“Sublime!” Shaw crows, clapping loudly.  Erik has evidently missed the memo that they’re at the opera.  “People from all over the world will be flocking in _droves_ to see live Velociraptor feeding every day at noon!”

Erik suspects PETA will have a few words to say about that but right now he has bigger fish to fry, as it were.  “Does no one actually care that we’re on an island full of things that will potentially eat us.”

“You scared, Lehnsherr?” Logan looks him up and down, one bushy eyebrow cocked in silent challenge.

“No,” Erik answers calmly.  Because he’s not.  The only thing on this island he might be afraid of are Logan’s eyebrows, which may actually be sentient.  “I’m just trying to point out something which everyone else appears to be _blatantly ignoring_.”

“Did you say something, Erik?” Charles asks, breaking off from the conversation he’s started with Hank about Velociraptor nutrition, which honestly, who _cares_.  Obviously they like rare steak.

“No,” Erik says pleasantly through his teeth while Logan smirks at him, “not a thing.”

 

X

 

Lunch is a tense affair.

Charles is fairly glad that it doesn’t last very long as it becomes very apparent very quickly that for whatever reason Erik and Logan do not like each other and are locked in some kind of primordial contest to decide who the alpha male is.  Honestly, it’s like he’s watching the backwards evolution of mankind before his very eyes.

Just because dinosaurs are back again doesn’t mean that cavemen have to return too (he is, of course, perfectly aware that the cavemen never walked the earth along with dinosaurs; it’s only an _expression_ ).

At least he gets the opportunity to talk a little more with Hank, at least when Shaw is not asking rapid-fire questions that are all aimed to determine how readily the island can be turned into something like a glorified zoo.  The idea makes Charles uncomfortable, to say the least.  Here they are with a golden opportunity to study live dinosaurs, and all Shaw wants to do is put them in cages and market it.

Hank has a delightful mind when he’s not being intimidated.  Charles can appreciate a man whose first love is science; all bright flashes of inspiration tucked in an endless stream of equations and calculations.  Throughout the course of their lunch Hank describes his DNA-splicing process a little more in-depth so that by the time they’ve finished eating Charles is raring to go on a tour of the labs.

Put less delicately, he’s basically frothing at the mouth and slobbering viciously like a rabid animal that should be put down effective immediately.  It’s unfortunate, sometimes, how passionate he can get about science and discovery, or at least that’s what his mother always said.

All of his hopes and dreams, however, are cruelly cut short by one Sebastian Shaw, approximately two seconds after the last paper napkin has been thrown away.  It’s very reminiscent of his kindergarten teacher.

“Well, boys, it looks like we won’t be needing your services after all,” he says with a laugh, clapping Hank on the shoulder.  “Henry here is light years ahead of us all, isn’t he?  Unfortunately the helicopter to the mainland isn’t due back for another few hours—”

“Got a plane,” Logan interrupts, breaking off from whatever kind of staring contest he’s got going on with Erik.  “It’s small but it should be able to carry the three of us.”

“ _Three_ of us?” Erik demands.  It’s good to see that his hearing is back online compared to earlier when Charles had asked him to pass the salt he’d gotten no response, Erik being too busy locked in a battle with Logan of Who Can Consume The Most Potato Salad In Under One Minute Without Breaking Eye Contact.

“Gotta have a pilot,” Logan answers like it’s obvious, which of course it kind of is.  “ _You_ sure as shit ain’t gonna fly it.”

Curiously, Charles is unable to touch Logan’s mind.  It’s like a bad radio station that is mostly obnoxiously loud white noise, and what little snatches of songs that you do catch are all ones you hate, making you want to change the station as fast as possible.  There are a few people in the world with minds like this, impermeable even to high-level telepaths, and most of Charles’ telepathic acquaintances tend to shy away from such individuals.  There’s nothing telepaths collectively hate more than enigmas, given that their entire existence is based upon knowing everything about everyone they meet the very instant that they do.

Charles is a bit of an odd man out, considering that he finds such individuals intriguing.  What better novelty could there be besides someone he can’t find everything out about in less than a second?  Well, not counting dinosaurs, but he hadn’t been aware of their renewed existence anyway up until about an hour or two ago.

Still, despite how interesting Logan may be, Charles has no desire to be booted off the island so soon.  “I don’t mind waiting for the helicopter,” he says, trying not to sound too desperately hopeful.  Judging by Erik’s flat look, he doesn’t succeed.

“Oh, but I’ve wasted quite enough of your time already and I would hate to inconvenience you more,” Shaw insists, completely missing the point as is his standard functioning capacity.  “Logan can zip you back to the mainland in no time, problem solved.”

“Actually,” Charles hedges, “I was hoping to get a tour in of the labs with Hank before we left.”

“Henry and I have a lot of figures to run over,” Shaw says gravely, patting Hank’s shoulder again, “which I’m afraid can’t wait any longer.  I’ve put them all off for twenty years, anyway!”  He laughs loudly.  None of them join in.  “But thanks for your time, boys, I’m sorry for the abrupt change in plans, but, well.  Real dinosaurs, wasn’t expecting that!  Ta!”  He wraps an arm around Hank’s shoulder, which is an impressive feat when their height difference is taken into account, and steers the young scientist away, leaving Charles blinking after them in shock.

Revision: this is _worse_ than his kindergarten teacher gently explaining how long dinosaurs have been extinct.  At least this time he has Erik to pat his back consolingly, even if the metallokinetic looks a little bit freaked out by his own partaking in the action.

And this is how, half an hour later, Charles finds himself in the extremely cramped cabin of the sketchiest airplane he’s ever seen in his entire life, holding on tightly as Logan somehow gets them up into the air by a combination of both magic and miracle, with perhaps a dash of mutation thanks to Erik.

“Should you be smoking that?” Charles dares to ask, looking dubiously at the cigar Logan had procured from nowhere halfway through takeoff that now hangs precariously from the corner of his mouth.

“I don’t need any preachy bullshit, Xavier,” Logan says, immeasurably calm for a man behind the controls of a plane currently bouncing through the sky like a rubber ball.  “It’s my body, I’ll do what I want with it.”

“I couldn’t care less about your personal health,” Charles replies shortly, gripping the seat so tightly that his knuckles are white.  “I’m more concerned about how likely it is that this plane will explode.”

“I’d be more worried about it falling apart first,” Erik interjects helpfully, his eyes squeezed shut in concentration.  Charles can practically feel him holding every last nut and bolt of the plane in place with his powers, which is both amazing in the fact that he can do things like that and extremely worrisome that he has to in the first place.

Very abruptly, like the clouds parting suddenly to allow a single, shining ray of sunlight through to illuminate all, Charles realizes that this isn’t going to end well.  In fact, he thinks serenely, it’s probably going to end horribly.  His desire to not leave the island yet may very well be granted, only not in the fashion he originally wanted.

The plane makes a very odd sound that planes in general have no business ever making, followed by an awful jolt that relocates Charles’ stomach from his midsection to his throat.

“Fuck,” says Logan, still unreasonably unruffled despite the fact that it feels like they’ve gone into free fall.

“Shit,” says Erik, snarling over another loud sound that is suspiciously similar to that of an entire wing tearing off the side of the plane.

 _Bugger_ , thinks Charles when the plane goes into a deadly spiral towards the ground, blue sky and green jungle spinning wildly out the view of the tiny front windows in an extremely dizzying fashion.

The last thing Charles remembers is being thrown out of his seat entirely and slamming into the ceiling which has temporarily become the floor, and then Erik throwing his entire body on top of him, magnetizing them both to the metal when the ceiling decides it was meant to be on top again after all, and after that everything goes mercifully dark.


	3. Eocene

X

Erik comes to very gradually and discovers two things.

Thing Number One: he’s lying on his back in the middle of airplane wreckage with Charles on top of him, still out cold.

Thing Number Two: he’s being stared at by a dinosaur that is roughly the size of a Chihuahua, were a Chihuahua ever inclined to stand on two legs and had the head of a snake, complete with mean, hungry little eyes.

“Gah,” Erik says, proving that evolution has indeed come far on Earth by demonstrating his membership of a species that has graduated from hissing to grunting, and swats at Thing Number Two in an attempt to get it to go away.

Thing Number One, as far as he’s concerned, can stay awhile.

Thing Number Two _chirps_ at him, bounding backwards out of reach.  It cocks its head, tiny whip-like tail lashing back and forth as it studies him.  It hasn’t opened its mouth yet so Erik can’t tell if it’s a carnivore or an herbivore, but he’s going to operate on the assumption that everything on this godforsaken _rock_ is extremely excited about taking a bite out of him.

“You,” Erik says, pointing at it menacingly to show it he means business, “stay.”

The little dinosaur opens its mouth this time and hisses, revealing tiny rows of razor sharp teeth.  Yeesh.

Thing Number One starts to stir, emitting a faint groan.  He's sprawled across Erik on his back, which only makes sense in the vaguest of ways when Erik remembers that originally he'd jumped on top of Charles, pinning him to the ceiling of the plane to keep them both from breaking their necks or worse, _expelled_.

On second thought, maybe it doesn't make sense at all.

 _Urgh_ , Charles thinks distinctly, and Erik has the pleasure to experience the absolutely divine sensation of sticking his head in a blender as his brain is overtaken by Charles' confused, disorientated one.  He wonders what flavor of milkshake he would be.  Is it even possible to have a strawberry milkshake with chocolate chips sprinkled in?

Very suddenly he's reciting Pi, except he's going well past the measly few digits he actually knows and continuing on into a long string of numbers that he knows are right without having ever known this many digits of Pi and these are not his thoughts—

"Charles!" Erik will deny to his deathbed that he has ever in his life uttered something even remotely close to a yelp but in this particular moment he comes quite close, struggling to shift Charles off himself so that he can actually sit up.

 _Whoa_ , Charles says, dazed, as he slides off Erik to one side.

Erik scoots away, and the lack of direct contact (though a small part of him that won't shut up mourns it) seems to help, effectively lessening the mental onslaught.  Charles' mind is still pressed close to his own, but at least it's no longer threatening to overtake him.  It's rather like being on a small boat next to a blue whale so exuberantly happy that it's decided to breach—it's not hurting you and rather magnificent to watch, but at the same time you can't help but feel vaguely alarmed at how easily it could accidentally drown you.

"Charles," he repeats firmly, levering himself up.  He crouches beside the telepath and peers down at him intently but doesn't attempt to touch him just yet, as much as he'd like to brush away the one errant curl of hair plastered against Charles' sweaty forehead. "You need to focus.  Are you hurt?"

"M'fine," Charles groans, throwing an arm across his eyes wearily.  Beneath that, he thinks groggily, _You have nice eyes._

Erik takes a moment to preen.  He _does_ have nice eyes, thank you very much, and 500 dollars to the first person to correctly identify their color.

"You weren't supposed to hear that," Charles mutters, flushing a lovely pink.  Or that could be sunburn.  He _is_ pretty pale despite the galaxies of freckles spiraling artfully across what Erik has so far seen of his skin.  Further study, of course, is still needed to chart more—don’t beam me up, Scotty, beam me _down_.

"Well if you don't want me to hear things then you'd better collect yourself and stop projecting," Erik says with a shrug.  Personally he's still doing something eerily similar to the Macarena in his own mind over the fact that Charles likes his eyes.  He can't help it, it's the only dance he knows.  "Are you hurt, though?"  Erik is suddenly acutely aware that he has no idea what to do with a concussed telepath, never mind a concussed telepath out in the middle of a jungle.

"No, I'm fine," Charles assures him.  He even goes the extra mile, sitting up and offering Erik a smile.  "And I understand I have you to thank for that."

It takes Erik a moment to catch his meaning.  "Oh.  The thing in the plane."  Oddly he finds himself suddenly extremely interested in the brightly-colored bush off to the left over Charles' shoulder.  "It was nothing."

"If it weren't for you, I'd likely be dead," Charles points out.

"Anyone in my place would've done the same,” Erik says dismissively, and gives himself a mental pat on the back for not curling up into a sad little ball of desolation at the mere thought of a dead Charles.  Get ahold of yourself, Lehnsherr, you’ve only survived a plane crash with the guy, not married him.

Yet.

Wait, _what_?

Oblivious to Erik’s thoughts in a way telepaths probably shouldn’t be, Charles studies him for a long moment, blue eyes replaced by blue laser beams of wisdom and justice.  Feeling rather exposed, Erik's on the verge of accusing him of concealing a secondary mutation that has something to do with x-ray vision when Charles finally shakes his head and goes, "Modesty doesn't become you, my friend.  You seem like you’d be much better at 'arrogant arsehole.'"

"Did you just compliment me and insult me at the same time," Erik says blankly.

"I'm told it's a talent," Charles replies cheerfully, and then makes a show of looking around.  "Now, where are we?"

A very poignant question.  Grateful for the subject change, Erik looks around for the first time.  Definitely a jungle.  Hard to mess that one up.  It appears that they crashed through several trees to get here, their ruined remains creating a wide trail of destruction scattered with snapped off branches and plane parts both.  More wreckage is scattered around them, nothing much left intact by their brutal landing.  It's amazing, really, that he and Charles aren't in as many pieces too.

"We're in the middle of nowhere on an island of dinosaurs," he summarizes, because that's all he has to say about that.

"Well," Charles says, utterly serene, "it could be worse.  We could've crashed into the ocean."

Erik tries to imagine how that would've gone but stops when he gets to the part where sharks show up for afternoon tea.

"Oh, it's a Compsognathus!" Charles exclaims, unquestionable champion of the Inane Knowledge Competition as he perks up upon his gaze falling on the little dinosaur still staring at them with beady eyes.  He struggles up to his feet, a little unsteadily at first before he gains his balance, taking a few steps closer towards the object of his fascination.

"Uh, Charles," Erik says carefully, scrambling up after him, "that—thing, it has teeth."

"Rather a lot of things have teeth," Charles answers, unconcerned as he bends down for a closer look at the little monster.

"A _lot_ of teeth," Erik emphasizes.

"You have a lot of teeth," Charles answers absently, "I'm hardly afraid of _you_."

"Sharp teeth," Erik stresses, exactly as it opens its jaws again to hiss, "Charles—"

"Clearly designed for ripping and tearing," Charles muses, "so possibly a carrion-eater though judging by its behavior now, it isn't afraid of stalking live—"

Erik knows it’s going to happen a second before it does; notices the subtle coiling in the dinosaur’s back legs just before it takes a flying leap straight at Charles' face, jaws open and front claws extended.  It takes Erik just as long to snatch up a hunk of metal from the airplane wreckage and smack the little terror away like a fly.  The dinosaur hits the ground several feet away, rolling and shrieking, and then streaks off into the undergrowth, gone from sight.

"Erik!" Charles cries indignantly.

"That thing was going to eat your face off," Erik says flatly.  His hunk of metal still floats ominously in the air, a hovering watchdog on the lookout for any other dangers.

"Not everything on this island is out to get you," Charles says with a roll of his eyes, straightening and dusting himself off reflexively, "I don't know what you're so afraid of."

"I'm not afraid of anything," Erik says firmly, "and in case you missed what I said the first time, that thing was about to eat your face off.  Or was going for your jugular.”  Same difference, as far as he’s concerned.

Charles huffs out a sound of disbelief that has Erik grinding his teeth, but at least he doesn't try to argue further.

This plunges them into a—not _uncomfortable_ silence, but one charged with an undeniable, underlying tension.  Erik shifts, warily eyeing the ring of undergrowth surrounding them.  They need to figure out how to make it back to McCoy's lab, preferably before something larger than a Compo-Compsog-Cosmopolitan- _whatever_ shows up.

This potential threat in Erik’s mind has a very distinct shape and size with a name that starts with the letter _T_ and rhymes with…sex.

“Oh god,” Charles says, sounding so horrified that Erik gives himself whiplash when his thoughts switch from dicks to deciding how to deal with whatever imminent threat that must be emerging from the bushes, “where’s Logan?”

Oh yeah.  That asshole.  “Probably dead,” Erik guesses with a shrug, marginally relaxing again now that he’s sure that nothing is actually attacking them and that Charles has once again failed to overhear his thoughts.

“Erik,” Charles says, somehow managing to compress all the reproachful disapproval of a librarian shushing small children in the two syllables of Erik’s name.  It would be impressive if it had nothing to do with a hairy Neanderthal that should’ve gone extinct a long time ago anyway.

“We don’t have time to mourn,” Erik says gravely, omitting the fact that he doesn’t want to mourn at all.  The man put them in a plane that was clearly unfit for flying, for crying out loud, nearly killing them both and landing them in their current predicament.  In fact he wishes Logan would come back to life, just so Erik could kill him all over again.  “We need to salvage what we can from here, and then try to figure out how to find our way back to—”

“CONSTANT VIGILANCE,” booms a voice from out of nowhere, causing Charles to jump at least a foot in the air while Erik may or may not have a spontaneous aneurism.

Logan swings into the clearing on a vine like Tarzan reborn, his clothes torn up and shredded despite the fact that his hair has somehow managed to retain its bizarre double-pronged shape.  He swings around them once in a wide circle before letting go and dropping down to the ground with a solid thud, folding his arms against his chest.  His feet are inexplicably bare.

He also has a large, jagged piece of metal protruding from his chest.

“What,” says Erik, “the fuck.”

Logan snorts.  “You two lovebirds have a nice nap?”

“ _Lovebirds_?” Erik demands, his voice at least one octave higher than normal.

“You have, ah,” Charles says weakly with vague hand motions, staring at Logan’s chest, “a thing.”

Logan uncrosses his arms, puffing out his chest such that Erik is strongly reminded of a turkey, if turkeys could ever be that hairy.  “Nice pecs, right?”  Logan nods appreciatively.  “I know.”

“No, you idiot,” Erik says flatly, “you have a large piece of airplane sticking out of you.”

Logan looks down and takes in the sharp, twisted metal.  It’s like he’s actually just now seeing it for the first time.  So much for _constant vigilance_.  “Oh.  That.”  He shrugs.  “Mind pulling it out, bub?”

“Absolutely not,” Charles sputters in alarm, grabbing Erik’s arm as if that would actually prevent him from using his powers, “if we pull that out now you’ll just bleed to death!”

Erik fails to see the fault in this plan.

 Logan laughs.  Erik can visibly see him slipping down the sanity scale.  "Relax, Chuck, that ain't gonna happen."  And then, without hesitation, he reaches up and rips the metal out of his chest.

"Holy shit," Erik says blankly while beside him Charles gasps at the fucking _waterfall_ of blood that seeps through Logan's shirt as soon as the shrapnel is free.

Logan grunts, locking his knees to keep from collapsing, but as Erik watches in horrified fascination, Logan’s skin begins to meld back together, rapidly healing on its own.  In only a matter of seconds the wound is completely closed up and all that remains is a bloodstain roughly the size of Africa.

"Oh my god," Charles says, and Erik might actually vomit a little in his mouth at the pure wonder in the telepath's voice, "Logan, that's _amazing_."

"It has its perks," Logan answers with a nod, rolling his shoulders once.  He sounds so satisfied with himself that Erik is tempted to stick a piece of sharp metal _elsewhere_ in Logan’s person to see how well he fares.  "Anyway, I did some scouting while you two were catching up on your beauty sleep."

"Wouldn't have taken much to wake us up," Erik mutters, "or, maybe, check our pulses."

"You say something, Lehnsherr?"

"No," Erik replies pleasantly, "do continue."

"We've got a long hike ahead of us, boys," Logan admits, squatting down and using his finger to draw out what Erik assumes is the general shape of the island.  Charles hurries over to examine the world's shittiest map so Erik reluctantly follows.  "Basically, Hank's lab is here."  He draws a large _X_ on one side of the island, which looks like a thick cucumber.  Or dick.  Either one.

"Wait, wait, wait," Charles says, so urgently that both Erik and Logan look up for signs of approaching danger, "is that north or south?"

There’s a pause.

"That's a legitimate question," Erik defends Charles in the face of Logan's flat stare, "I was curious too."

Charles beams at him and once again Erik is floored just by imagining how many small, rural villages in a third world country could be fully powered by that one smile alone.

"South," Logan says, emphasizing this by drawing an obnoxiously large _S_ beneath the island.  "Happy?"  He continues only once Charles has nodded.  "From what I can tell, we're about here."  He draws another _X_ at the top of the island, accompanied by an _N_ above it.  "North."

"How sure are you of that?" Erik asks skeptically.  His powers are pretty useful when it comes to figuring out where north is, but he’s fairly certain that Logan doesn’t have an easy cheat like that.

"Climbed a tree," Logan answers, jerking his chin up towards the canopy overhead.  "The coastline's a couple hundred yards to our right, which is definitely north judging by the sun’s position.  It’s easier to see it up there."

Erik's almost disappointed by how reasonable he sounds.

"Well, that's not so bad," Charles ventures, gesturing between the two X's on the map.  "The island is only, what, three by five miles?  We could—"

Logan barks out a laugh.  "Three by five?  Where the hell did you get those numbers?  This island is closer to twenty miles at its broadest, which as you can see is north to south."

"Mr. Shaw said three by five originally," Charles says, deflating a little and closely resembling a kicked puppy, which makes Erik shift uncomfortably.  Usually when he encounters something this cute and/or defenseless, he has to fight off the strong urge to smash it.

"Shaw doesn't know jack shit," Logan says scornfully.  "I think he's spent a little too much time in a radiation chamber.  Or in front of a mirror."

"Careful," Erik says gravely, "I might have to actually like you for that."

"Gross," Logan agrees.

"We may as well get started, gentlemen," Charles announces, clapping his hands together once.  "Twenty miles isn't impossible, but we don't have much as far as supplies go—”

"We ain't got shit," Logan interjects helpfully.  Unfortunately, he’s right.  Erik’s already checked his iPhone in the vain hope that he’d actually have service out here, but it’d been completely dead.  He suspects that this is some cruel form of Steve Jobs’ everlasting reign of terror from beyond the grave.

"—and I imagine that the terrain won't be easy to traverse," Charles continues.  Erik gets the feeling that Charles has decided to remain determinedly cheerful no matter what, which is either going to miraculously keep all of their spirits up or result in them all killing each other.  The later outcome has a much higher probability than the former.  "Logan, you'll have to lead the way—"

"What about me?" Erik demands, because he refuses to be useless while Logan saves the proverbial day.

"You'll be rear guard," Charles assures him quickly, "it's very important."

Logan snorts.

Erik calmly flips him the bird.  Clearly Logan doesn't give a shit and Charles is only humoring him, so it's up to Erik to keep an eye out for anything that might remotely look like it's thinking about eating them.  He takes a considering look at his beloved airplane scrap metal that still hovers obediently in midair.  He's already used it to fend off one hungry dinosaur, so he might as well stick with what he knows.  He's a pretty firm believer in the old _if it ain't broke, don't fix it_.  Except...

He clenches one fist and with a loud crunch the metal reshapes, flattening out and sharpening until it resembles something less like a twisted wing flap and more like a four-foot-long machete.  Now _that's_ more like it.

"Let's do this," he says, and god help the first dinosaur that crosses their path now.

In fact, he fucking _dares_ them.

 

X

 

Charles is hot.

The word _hot_ has a few different connotations, all of which apply to Charles.  He knows he's attractive.  That's a tried and tested hypothesis which has come out positive every single time, except for the one outlying case where the other subject had been more interested in his brain than his cock, but Tony can't really be measured on any normal scales anyway so Charles doesn't consider it a dent in his record.

More recently and much more promisingly, Erik had confirmed Charles' constant attractiveness by stuttering to a complete halt when Charles had been unfortunately forced to ditch his tweed jacket lest he expire prematurely from heatstroke.  Charles would unhesitatingly abandon every last article of tweed he owns, however, if only to hear Erik's muttered, "Your shirt brings out your eyes," a few more times.

Which it does.  His collar is no longer as crisp as he usually likes it, drooping limply in the extreme jungle humidity, but the color of his shirt almost exactly matches the color of his eyes, which is entirely intentional.  Charles wears this shirt when he wants to look put-together, sharply defined, utterly irresistible—

Er.  Back to the actual matter at hand.

Charles is hot, and for the time being he means it in the most literal, simplest way: he feels like he’s being cooked in an oven.  In fact, one could even combine the two connotations of the word in a broad sense and go so far as to say that he’s currently a hot _mess_.  Sweat is pouring off him in buckets.  His hair probably looks like a large bird of prey has decided to build a nest in it, complete with the bones of small mammals that have been gleefully ripped to shreds and eaten.

Okay, so maybe it's only a few twigs and leaves.

Despite all this, Charles is enthralled—he's on an _adventure_.  It may be hotter than balls, if you will, but he's on a hike with two attractive men in a beautiful tropical jungle on an island that contains real, live dinosaurs.  He's honestly not sure what more anyone could ever want.

He supposes it would be a hypothetical cherry on top if the dinosaurs would start making actual appearances, though.  They've been picking their way through the dense foliage of the jungle floor for close to an hour now, and the last dinosaur Charles has seen was the Compsognathus back in the clearing, which he didn't even get a good look at anyway since Erik had decided to play baseball with it.  Sigh.

Logan is several yards ahead, slicing a path through the undergrowth with his long, sharp claws.  _That_ had been an interesting development; apparently the claws are his primary mutation while the invincibility is secondary.  Charles had wanted to ask him more but Erik had pointed out that they probably only had a few more hours of daylight left at best, could they please get a move on.  He'd also rolled his eyes.  Epically.  It'd probably been visible from the International Space Station.

A little bit overkill, if you ask Charles.

Logan comes to an abrupt halt, holding up one hand in a fist to signal his stop.  Charles dutifully waits, even as he peers intently through the bushes around them.  This is the third time Logan's paused their mini procession.  The first time was only a drill (Erik was Not Amused) and the second time was a false alarm (even Less Amused), but Charles is holding out hope that eventually they'll run into _something_.

"I think you're just hearing things again," Erik says from behind Charles, completely unimpressed.  Charles is rather touched how Erik's basically been hovering near him the entire time, sticking close even though it's under the misguided, silly assumption that they're all going to be eaten.

"No, listen," Logan snaps, and they fall silent again.

At first Charles can't hear anything beside the usual, expected jungle noises—leaves rustling in the occasional breeze overhead, and the drone of millions of insects.  He sighs inwardly, disappointed.  He's _never_ going to see another dinosaur.  Ever.  His inner kindergartener is close to tears.

And then, after the last breeze dies off and the drone of the insects dips into a temporary lull, Charles' ears pick up on a low grunting sound, almost too deep to be audible but undeniably _there_ , even after Charles listens for several seconds with baited breath to make sure he’s not tricking himself into hearing something that isn’t actually real.

"Do you hear that?" he whispers, breathless with excitement.  His inner kindergartener is jumping up and down and running in circles.

Erik's only response is to lift his makeshift machete a little higher into the air, tensing.

"I think it's coming from up ahead," Logan says, starting off through the bushes.

That's all Charles needs to hear in order to hurry off after him, breaking into a light jog to catch up and ignoring Erik's hissed, "This is the _stupidest_ thing—"

The grunting gets a little louder as they progress, so Logan slows their pace, creeping gingerly through the greenery towards the source.  Charles is practically bursting with excitement because what's it going to be, what's it going to—

"Damn," says Logan.

"My eyes," Erik laments.

Charles stares speechlessly.

At the base of a tree with an enormous, thick trunk and multiple low-hanging branches are two Triceratops, unmistakable by their majestic horns and trademark frills.  It's also very clear that they are the source of the low grunting, since what Charles assumes is the male Triceratops has mounted what he assumes is the female Triceratops and they are—well.

"Fucking like bunnies, ain't they?" Logan remarks.

"Don't ever say the word 'bunnies' again," Erik tells him, even while his horrified gaze remains locked on the Triceratops.

"Marvelous," Charles says, dimly aware that he's grinning so widely that his cheeks ache.  His brain overflows with hundreds of questions regarding the sexual activity of Triceratops.  Are there courting rituals involved?  Do females take only one mate?  More?  A different one each mating season?  A mate for life?  How many eggs per brood?

"Why are we still watching this," Erik says distantly, like he's gone into shock.  "Why am _I_ still watching this?  Are we done here?  I'm done here.  I never wanted to be started here but now I'm definitely finished here."

"They're havin' a good time, eh, Chuck?" Logan says slyly, leering at him.  This includes quite a bit of involvement with his eyebrows, which wag suggestively.

" _Finished here_ ," Erik repeats loudly.

"Don't startle them, Erik," Charles admonishes.  He flaps a hand at Logan, without tearing his gaze away from the Triceratops.  "It does seem like it.”  He pauses thoughtfully.  “I wonder if they only mate for purpose to reproduce young, or if they ever mate for pleasure.  Some animals _do_ do that.”

"Be interesting to find out, wouldn't it?" Logan purrs.

Erik's machete nearly snaps in half.

"Quiet, both of you," Charles shushes them as Logan chuckles.

"C'mon, Chuck," he says, beckoning, "leave 'em with some privacy.  I don't want to be around when they finish up, some of the bigger males can get territorial."

"So they’re a patriarchy?" Charles muses, distracted enough to allow himself to be led away.  He _does_ wish that they could stay and observe the Triceratops more when they're doing something other than copulating, but then again those horns do look pretty lethal.  "I wonder where the rest of their herd is.  They move in herds, don't they?"

"Small ones," Logan confirms as he leads them in a wide circle around the Triceratops.  "We haven't done much in the area of field work, unfortunately, but we do know that much."

"Why not?" Charles asks in dismay.  Were he stationed here, he would have a _field day_ —literally—with all the discoveries to make just by observation.

"Only four of us out here," Logan answers. "Hank's in the lab, and like I said before our other guy got carried off when the Velociraptors got out.  Don't imagine we'll be seeing _him_ ever again.  The last guy just does maintenance work.  So technically that leaves me in the field, but I'm just one guy.  I can't do everything."

"Maybe now that Mr. Shaw is actively invested in the island again, he'll hire more scientists," Charles says wistfully.

Logan snorts, and even Erik makes a small derisive sound.  "He's gonna turn it into a zoo, Chuck.  Ain't no science to be had here."

"That's too bad," Charles says softly.

"It is," Erik agrees, surprisingly solemn.  Charles can tell by the timbre of his thoughts that he means it, and offers him a warm smile.  Erik does that adorable thing where he has no idea how to react to that but tries to play it cool anyway, which means Charles has to disguise his laugh as a cough.

They lapse into silence after that, each lost in their own respective bubbles of thought while devoting the majority of their energy into concentrating on their walking.  The afternoon drags on, the temperature getting hotter and the humidity getting heavier with each passing minute, until it's so stifling beneath the trees that Charles finds it's almost hard to breathe properly.  He's also quite parched, his mouth dry despite how much he's sweating.  Or _was_ sweating.  He's not sure that he has any water left inside him.

Has he mentioned that it’s hot?  He’s hot.  Very hot.

"I do believe we should find a stream of some kind," he says faintly at one point, stumbling a little when his foot catches on a tree root hidden beneath fallen leaves littering the ground.

"Good idea," Erik agrees fervently.  He's given up on holding his machete at the ready in midair with his powers, and now he's using it as a hiking stick.  He grabs Charles by the forearm with his free hand when Charles stumbles, his grip strong and sure.  It makes Charles shiver.  "Are you alright?"

"Fine," Charles answers vaguely.  He means to give Erik a smile in thanks but he's pretty sure it comes out more like a grimace.  "Just thirsty."

"There should be a stream close by if I'm remembering my geography correctly," Logan says, coming to a stop and turning around to face them.  He eyes them critically.  If Charles had the energy, he'd be annoyed by how unfazed Logan is by the heat.  "Why don't you two take a break and I'll climb up to see if I can spot anything."  He latches onto the nearest tree trunk and starts pulling himself up without even waiting for an answer.

Erik sits down wearily right where he's standing, letting out a sigh of relief.  "Dinosaurs aside, this island is miserable."

Charles mumbles something in response that probably isn't very coherent, starting off through the trees on his own.  If he stops now, he's not sure he'll be able to find the energy to start again.  Best to just keep moving.

Somewhere behind him, Erik scrambles back up to his feet.  "Charles?"

Charles keeps going.  He imagines that he can hear rushing water.  Maybe the stream is even closer than Logan thought.  All he wants is a drink of water.  Maybe a nice splash on the face.  Or even better, a swim.  Maybe he can convince Erik to join him.  They could skinny dip.

Now _that_ would be nice.

"Whoa!" Charles lets out a startled cry when the ground abruptly drops out from beneath him, pitching forward and rolling down the steep incline he hadn't even noticed in his hazy delirium.  He tumbles for several terrifying seconds, head over heels and aware of Erik shouting his name while the jungle spins around him dizzyingly and oh god he hopes he doesn't impale himself on a branch or dash his head on a rock—

He lands in a heap at the bottom of the hill, panting.  Nothing hurts too badly, even when he gingerly sits up, initially bracing himself for pain.  He lets out a sigh of relief when none comes.  "I'm alright," he calls up to Erik, who is still yelling his name and crashing down the hill somewhere above him, "I'm fine, nothing's broken, be careful, it's, ah, obviously slippery—”

Charles looks up and freezes.

Six Velociraptors stare curiously back at him, large eyes unblinking and trained on him in the same way a cat hones in on a very helpless and very doomed mouse.

"Oh," Charles says, very, very calmly, "hello."


	4. Oligocene

 

 

 

X

Jungles are dark, scary places that should require at least three different professional licenses to exist.

This is what Erik tells himself as he crashes down the side of the hill in search of Charles, blatantly ignoring the afternoon sunlight streaming down through the trees in brilliant, golden rays and also refusing to acknowledge the vast array of brightly colored flowers that are probably prone to bursting into Disney songs about vastly misleading concepts of love.

Dark and scary.  Yes.

“Charles!” he calls, even as he loses his footing for a heart-stopping split second and nearly faceplants in the undergrowth.  It’s extremely ungraceful and on any other day Erik would be appalled at himself but today he doesn’t give a shit because _Charles_.

Erik decides not to look too closely at that line of reasoning either, especially since he inherently knows it will lead him to places that he is probably not yet ready to tread.

He’s nearly at the very bottom of the slope when his foot catches on a creeping vine and this time he’s unable to stop himself from falling, pitching forward with a yelp and sliding down the rest of the way in a wild tangle of limbs.

The good news is that this is ultimately how he finds Charles, landing on his stomach right next to the smaller man with a groan, fairly certain that he’s bruised his ribs.

The bad news is that he finds Charles staring down six Velociraptors, all of which are staring back with the distinct air of _ah yes, dinner is served_.

Frick.

“I believe I’ve found the missing Velociraptors,” Charles says calmly, in his perfectly rounded British vowels that make Erik simultaneously want to blow him and yet strangle him.  It’s very confusing.  Or just very kinky.  He can’t decide.

“I’d prefer if you hadn’t,” Erik mutters.  He carefully sits up slowly, both eyes on the nearest Velociraptor in case it takes his movement as an open invitation to eat his face off.

“Look, Erik, they _do_ have feathers,” Charles says, fascinated, and obviously giving no thought to their imminent danger.

“You’re certainly feeling better,” Erik grumbles as he carefully shifts his legs back underneath himself so that he’s in a low crouch now instead of lying down on his stomach like a slab of meat on a platter.  “Did you happen to hit your head on the way down.”

“Oh my god,” Charles says, eyes suddenly going wide and round, and just when Erik’s thinking that their situation seems to have finally caught up with the telepath, he adds with breathless reverence, “they’ve built a nest.”

The nest is small, little more than a carefully dug hollow in the ground that has been surrounded by a few torn-off tree branches that must serve as some form of camouflage or protection.  At first glance Erik counts four brown eggs clustered together in the center.

Great.  Four reasons for the Velociraptors to go all territorial and protective on their asses, never mind that they were already prepared to eat them anyway.

Erik can _feel_ Charles vibrating with excitement even though there's a good foot of space between them.  It has to be a telepath thing.  "A real nest," he says, with what Erik imagines is the same fervor shared by a longtime Beatles fan who has just run into Sir Paul at the grocery store, "Erik, that's a real, live Velociraptor nest!  I wonder when the eggs will hatch!"

"Hopefully never," Erik says, continuing his streak of Unrepentant Honesty.

"Erik," Charles protests, "that's horrible!"

"No, it's four less Velociraptors trying to eat us," Erik says, which in his opinion is an extremely logical standpoint on the matter.

The Velociraptor standing guard over the nest opens its mouth and hisses.  Two of the other Velociraptors flanking the small clearing take a step forward.  It registers dimly somewhere in the very back of Erik's mind that is not occupied with calculating how much those teeth are going to hurt versus how much those claws are going to hurt that the Raptors' movements are very similar to those of a wolf pack on the hunt.

This is nothing close to reassuring so the thought is quickly dismissed.  Ignorance, after all, truly is bliss.

"I think they heard you," Charles says.  Erik is pleased to note that for the first fucking time all day, the telepath sounds appropriately nervous.

"Of course they heard me, I'm sitting right here."

"No," Charles clarifies, "I think they _understood_ you."

"Impossible," Erik scoffs, right as the Velociraptor beside the nest hisses again and all the Raptors in the clearing hunch down into what Erik immediately dubs Stalking Mode.  "Okay, okay, when's the due date, here's hoping for four healthy, bouncing baby lizards—"

"You've made them angry," Charles accuses as the Raptors slowly begin to spread out and Erik would really like for the referee of this match to blow his whistle and call foul because clearly six against two is extremely unfair even without the away team consisting of giant, hungry man-eaters.

" _I_ made them angry?" Erik demands in disbelief.  " _You're_ the one who went swan diving off a hill and intruded on their little clubhouse in the first place—"

"It's not like I did on _purpose_ —"

"I don't think they care about purpose, all they care about is the free meal that was just hand-delivered to their front door—"

"You make them sound like mindless beasts when _clearly_ there is some kind of social hierarchy being displayed—"

"Oh wonderful, does that mean they'll be taking turns, then, when they're ripping us to shreds?"

Charles opens his mouth to reply, but is unceremoniously cut off by something that makes even the Velociraptors, which have been creeping quietly closer throughout the course of their disagreement, pause.

_Boom.  Boom.  Boom._

"What," Erik says, a great deal more calmly than he actually feels, "is that."

_Boom.  Boom.  Boom._

"I couldn't be sure," Charles says hesitantly, "but..."

_Boom.  Boom._

"The ground is shaking."

_Boom.  Boom._

"Indeed."

_Boom.  Boom._

"It's getting closer."

_Boom.  Boom._

"It appears so, yes."

_Boom._

"Yep," Erik says with a nod, "we're going to die."

A Tyrannosaurus rex steps out of the trees and into the clearing, towering above them all with its open, gaping jaws.  The Velociraptors all whirl around instantly to face this new threat, hissing and snarling, but Erik and Charles remain absolutely still where they are, staring up at the greatest predator to ever walk the face of the earth in all 4.6 billion years of its long, winding history.

Erik feels all the fight go out of him at once.  With the Velociraptors—even six Velociraptors—it was different.  There, at least, he might've been able to hold his own for at least a little bit, and take a couple of them out with him.  But a Tyrannosaurus rex?  The Tyrant Lizard King?  What is there to do in the face of _that_?

He adamantly refuses to curl up into a small ball and cry, despite the fact that this appears to be his only remaining option.

"Wow," Charles says, expressing the same brand of horrified awe that Erik feels.

"Wow," Erik agrees.

The T-rex takes another step into the clearing, and in this proximity every stride it takes is a small-range earthquake that shakes the jungle floor beneath them.  The Velociraptors let out piercing cries in warning, banding together in front of the T-rex like a line of police wearing riot gear in front of an angry mob that happens to contain a very large amount of teeth.  Or it’s like watching six Corgis yapping at the heels of a Great Dane. Very ineffectual.

"They're protecting the nest," Charles realizes, his eyes darting back towards the small clutch of eggs.

"Good for them," Erik replies absently, far more preoccupied with slowly rising to his feet and risking a glance backwards up the hill.  He wonders how well T-rexes fare on inclines.  With the Velociraptors being equally distracted and a distract _ion_ , this could actually be their golden opportunity to casually slip—

The T-rex roars.

Erik has spent some time around things that can easily be quantified as Extremely Loud.  He's a metallokinetic; being around loud, heavy machinery is practically his life's calling.  But never has he encountered something so impossibly loud that for a few wild, confusing seconds he's fairly certain that his brain is leaking out of his ears.

It also ranks as probably the most terrifying sound in the known universe, but that is another category entirely.

At some point during the reverberating roar that is actually making Erik’s vision swim, Erik finds himself gripping Charles’ hand tightly after the telepath reaches over and wraps his fingers around Erik’s.  Charles tilts his head in Erik’s direction and offers him a weak, watery smile.

“I think maybe you were right to worry about being eaten,” he admits, the light tone of his voice offset by how Erik’s ears feel like they’re stuffed with cotton and by the way Erik can feel Charles’ hand trembling.

Erik gives his hand a squeeze, if only to hide how shaky his own hand probably is too.  “No one’s being eaten,” he says, fishing around in the undergrowth for his trusty piece of metal that had made the plunge down the hill with him and fortunately hadn’t decapitated either of them, “not if I can help it.”  He pulls Charles up to his feet and at the same time levitates his weapon into the air in front of them.

It is at this point that three things happen all at once.

The T-rex lowers its head and charges at the Velociraptors, shaking the trees with its footsteps and another deafening roar.  At the same time, Erik’s attention is drawn back down to the Velociraptors’ nest just in time to watch one of the eggs begin to crack open, though the only reason he actually notices is on the account of how Charles rips his hand out of Erik’s grip and _throws himself forward towards the nest._

“Charles!” Erik shouts, but the sound is inevitably lost beneath the overwhelming clamor of the Battle of the Century going on only several yards away as the Velociraptors take flying leaps at the Tyrannosaurus, digging in with claws and teeth while the larger dinosaur thrashes wildly with ear-splitting snarls.

Cursing, Erik leaps after Charles.  This is in fact the exact _opposite_ of the way Erik would actually prefer to be going, but damn it, _Charles_.  He catches up to the telepath, stumbling over the shaking ground and nearly flattening Charles when he reaches him.

 _What the fuck are you doing_ , Erik demands, forgoing spoken word and projecting every last ounce of his annoyance straight into Charles’ brain.

 _They’ll be trampled_ , Charles replies urgently, dropping down to his knees beside the nest.  He reaches for the closest egg, which already has a tiny little reptilian nose poking out of the top.

Erik has to duck when the T-rex shakes one of the Velociraptors loose, sending it hurtling past them overhead, shrieking wildly.  It hits the ground and rolls several paces before righting itself, its beady eyes fixing on the both of them beside the nest with a snarl.

Time to go.

 _I’ve never cared for scrambled eggs either_ , Erik tells Charles in way of consolation before hauling the smaller man back up to his feet and dragging him off at a dead run.  He catches a faint echo of wordless protest but fortunately Charles at least has the sense not to struggle, sprinting alongside Erik and keeping up as much his shorter legs will allow.

Behind them, the Velociraptor lets out an exotic, multi-octave cry and tears after them.  The rest of the Velociraptors still attached to the T-rex abruptly let go, bouncing to the ground and immediately take off in hot pursuit.  The T-rex roars again and charges, crushing bushes and knocking over smaller trees as it chases after _all_ of them through the jungle.

If Erik had the time, he would sit down and laugh hysterically.  He’s being chased by Velociraptors that are being chased by a Tyrannosaurus rex.  He would really like to know how this became his lot in life.

His very _short_ lot in life, at this rate.

“Aaahhhh!” Charles screams as the Velociraptor leading the chase catches up to them and takes a flying leap at them, jaws open wide.  With a wordless shout Erik swings wildly at it with his makeshift machete, batting it away like a piñata and sending it howling off to the side without even breaking his stride.

 _We need to get up high_ , Erik thinks as they continue to run, ever mindful of the other five Velociraptors hot on their heels and gaining swiftly.  Who even _designed_ these assholes, anyway?  They practically bounce across the terrain like rubber balls, when did that _ever_ seem like a good idea tacked on after all the teeth?

He is, of course, not even thinking about the Tyrannosaurus steadily gaining on them all.

 _There!_   Charles points as they leap in tandem over an old fallen log.

Ahead stands a tree with branches that may or may not be low enough for them to grab ahold of to climb.  As they hurtle towards it, Erik does some mental math.  Factors include distance to tree, distance of Velociraptors, time it takes to climb tree high enough, all with a large, constant variable of Tyrannosaurus rex.

The odds are not in their favor.  Thanks a lot Katniss.

And then Charles trips.

Erik doesn't even hesitate, he just reacts.  He grabs onto his chunk of metal and using his own forward momentum he swings himself around, whirling 180 degrees on the spot.  When his feet hit the ground he lets go of his weapon and flings it forward with all the strength of his power behind it, just in time to catch the nearest Velociraptor closing in on Charles right in the face.

The Raptor flips over backwards with a screech, barreling into one of its companions and they both go down in a dangerous, flailing pile of tails and claws and teeth.  The other three remaining Raptors are forced to scatter in order to avoid becoming tangled, but the Tyrannosaurus has no such compunctions.  It barrels towards them, head lowered with its jaws open wide, and snatches up one of the Raptors in its teeth.

The sounds that follow is one of the most awful things Erik has ever had the misfortune to experience as the T-rex shakes its head back and forth, whipping the dying Raptor around as it screams.  Drops of blood are flung in all directions as a red spray, some of them hitting Erik's shirt as he stumbles forward to where Charles has instinctively curled on the ground.

"Get up, get up!" he shouts, grabbing him beneath his arm and hauling him up to his feet.  "Run while it's distracted!"

Charles' face is white but he takes off running, arms wrapped around his middle.  Erik hopes that he's not hurt but there's no time to check now, not while they need to get the hell out of here pronto.  There are a few awful moments where they're running through the trees and Erik hasn't looked back yet to see if the T-rex or any of the other Velociraptors are following them, too intent on leading Charles to safety, but when he's finally able to risk a glance back, there's nothing.  Velociraptor must be tasty, and the others must have scattered.

Erik's boots hit gravel and they skid to a halt on the edge of Logan's promised river, panting and gasping for breath.  Charles leans over, sides heaving, while Erik looks around wildly for any sign of further danger.  There's nothing.  They're alone on the bank.

"I think—I think we've made it," he gets out between lungful after lungful of air.  His adrenaline is still pumping, every last nerve on fire and ready to snap as he flexes his power across his machete again and again.  They're alive.  Somehow they _survived_ that.

"That was—" Charles pants, still clutching his middle, "that was—insane."

"I told you this place is horrible," Erik can't help but reply, feeling extremely validated.  "I _told_ you."

"Yes," Charles says weakly, his voice thin and exhausted, "you did say."

"Are you hurt?" Erik demands, all personal satisfaction of being proven right evaporating immediately in the face of Charles' potential injury.  On any other day, Erik would have definitely labeled this as a Large Warning Sign.

"No, I'm—uh oh."

Erik would like to take the time to thank his mother for everything she's taught him and provided for him, including but not limited to one fine challah recipe.  That being said, he steels himself and turns around to see what exactly has caused Charles' face to drain what little color he'd managed to initially regain.

The four remaining Velociraptors step out of the brush and onto the gravelly shoreline of the river.

This is literally the worst day in the history of days.

Erik edges closer to Charles, holding his machete out in front of them protectively.  "I might be able to take a couple out," he mutters, engaging in a staring contest with the Velociraptor in the lead as the four dinosaurs stalk closer, "but four might be a stretch."

"They are fast," Charles agrees.  His shoulder brushes Erik's.  "At least it's better than six."

Erik doesn't break eye contact with the Raptor to give Charles a Look but he does make sure to project his dubiousness in high definition.  "I swear, if I didn't love you, I'd—"

What.

"What," says Charles.

A man in a red jumpsuit riding on the back of a Velociraptor bursts out of the bushes, waving a vine tied to resemble a lasso.  "WOOOOOOOO!"

"What," says Erik.

"YEEEEEEHAAAAAW!" the Velociraptor rider yodels, urging his mount forward like a majestic steed that happens to kill people in its spare time.  "THIS TOWN AIN'T BIG ENOUGH FOR THE BOTH OF US, PARTNER!"

" _What_ ," Erik reiterates.

The Raptors that have Erik and Charles cornered by the river turn to face this fresh new hell, snarling as the man and his Raptor charge at them.  When they get close his Raptor coils its legs and jumps, leaping through the air with a defiant cry while the man astride it gives another whoop, landing in the midst of the other Raptors.

By this point Erik has regained some of his senses and takes advantage of the confusion and whacks the nearest raptor with his weapon, cutting a long, deep slice across its haunch and sending it streaking off into the bushes.  Jumpsuit Man has turned his lasso into a whip, cracking it overhead sharply and running the other three Raptors off, his ride snapping its teeth after them as they go.

"THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE HIGHLANDER!"  He leaps off the back of his Raptor, does a backflip in midair and sticks his landing for a perfect Olympic ten, waving after the retreating dinosaurs.  "CALL ME!"

"Do you think I hit my head in the crash," Erik says to Charles.

"I think I hit mine too," Charles answers in a hushed voice.

Jumpsuit Man turns around to face them.  His Velociraptor steps up to side at his side.  They strike a pose.  Together.  With hand signs.  Erik can read the word _help_ in the Velociraptor's eyes.  "Greetings, friends!"

Erik and Charles both stare.  Both of their mouths hang open.

"What," Jumpsuit Man says with a wide grin, unperturbed by their silence, "have you nothing to say in the face of the mighty lone ranger Deadpool, and his trusty companion Spiderman?"  He leans in and whispers conspiratorially, "But our friends call us Wade and Peter."

"We're..."  Erik searches for a word.  Any word.  He draws a blank.  He has nothing to say in the face of this...this.

"Startled," Charles provides diplomatically.

"Yes," Erik says, "startled."

"It's alright, I'm startled too," Wade admits, and then shouts wildly, "Startled that you didn't rope yourselves a couple of Raptors!"

"Must've slipped our mind," Erik says faintly.

" _Cheep_ ," says Charles.

What the hell.

"Dude," Wade says, eyes going round as saucers, "congratulations, man, I'm so happy for you."

Charles beams.  "Gorgeous, isn't she?" he asks happily, cradling the tiny Velociraptor hatchling that Erik has just now noticed he's holding close to his chest.

What the _fuck_.

The little Raptor snaps its little teeth.  " _Cheep_."

 

X

 

_"Gorgeous, isn't she?"_

 

X

 

Logan lets go of his branch and drops the rest of the way down to the jungle floor, bending his knees to absorb the worst of the impact.  Truth be told, it'd been pretty refreshing to get up to the top of the canopy and catch a nice breeze.

He looks around, taking in the obvious lack of Lehnsherr and Xavier before reaching down to fish around in his pocket.  He pulls out half a cigar and puts it unlit in his mouth, chewing on the end.  The bitter taste is familiar.  Almost goddamn charming.  But it does nothing to change the fact that Lehnsherr and Xavier are very conspicuously Not Here.

"Well shit."

 

X

 

_"Charles, put it down."_

 

X

 

"Charles, put it down."

"Honestly, Erik, she's harmless—"

"It has teeth.  Put it down."

"She's just a baby—"

"Put that thing back where it came from, or _so help me_ —"

Charles narrows his eyes, clutching the little darling closer.  She nuzzles into his chest, making another one of her little _cheeping_ sounds so he strokes her soft, scaly head.  "Or what, Erik?  You'll do _what_?"

Erik fumes.  Charles can feel his mind racing, purring like a well-tuned engine as he searches for a viable reason to make Charles abandon the baby Velociraptor.  "It—damn it, Charles, its Mommy just tried to _eat_ us."

Charles is trying to be a Mature Adult while he argues his case, but he finds it extremely difficult not to snigger at the intimidating shark-man saying the word _Mommy_ with unmistakable murderous intent.  He manages to pull through without cracking, though it certainly takes some effort.  "Oh for god's sake, she's a _newborn_.  She couldn't eat us even if she wanted to.  I don't imagine she can get her jaws open wide enough quite yet."

"Yet," Erik insists, latching onto the word with ridiculous single-mindedness.  "That thing is going to grow into a killing machine, Charles."

"I doubt that's going to happen overnight," Charles answers dryly.

"What's her name, man?" The Wade fellow is standing rather far into Charles' personal space bubble, cooing at the baby Raptor as if it were a human baby instead.  Charles has already done a brief, low level scan of the man's mind and has concluded that he's harmless—a tad unhinged, but harmless.

"Well," Charles says, a bit surprised at himself, "I haven't thought about it much."

"A little busy _running for your life_ from its parents, maybe?" Erik suggests under the guise of being helpful.  Charles scowls at him.  "When did you even pick that thing up, anyway?"

"Back at the nest, before we ran, I snatched up her egg.  She hatched in my arms," Charles replies, a little dreamily as he shifts her gently.  "I wish we could've taken her siblings."

"One is enough," Erik snaps.

"So you're letting me keep her?" Charles asks, looking back up excitedly.  "Not that I would listen to you anyway, but I have your approval?"

"No," Erik says, but he isn't entirely able to meet Charles' eyes.  "It's a bad idea."  He doesn’t have much conviction.

Charles' triumphant grin softens a little.  A great deal of things have happened in the past ten minutes alone, but the moment that stands out the brightest in his memory—even more so than his rescue of the baby Velociraptor, he's slightly ashamed to admit—is when Erik let slip that he loves him.  Charles is sure that Erik meant it.  Looking at Erik now, and at the way the metallokinetic is wavering between _this is the stupidest idea in the history of ideas_ and _why does Charles look cute holding that thing_ , Charles feels that he could burst with affection for Erik.

Oh god, he’s in trouble.

"She's just a baby," he says softly, "we can't just leave her.  She'll die."

Erik looks like he wants to groan but turns it into a forceful sigh.  "Fine.  Keep it.  Just keep it and its teeth away from me."

Charles tickles the little Raptor beneath the chin and she _cheeps_ again, squirming happily.  "We promise to keep all teeth and tails to ourselves."

"Awww," Wade says, wiping a tear from his eye.  "She looks just like you."

Erik must have swallowed a bug on accident or something because he chokes, coughing for a few moments while waving a hand wildly at Charles' concerned look.

"I'm not sure I know what you mean," Charles tells Wade politely, "but I'll take your word for it."

Wade's Velociraptor, Peter—or Spiderman, but Charles isn’t sure he’s ever seen anyone or anything that fits the name _Spiderman_ less—chooses this moment to take a curious step forward towards Charles, leaning forward to sniff at the little one.

"Hey," Erik says sharply, shouldering his way in front of Charles like an overenthusiastic, self-appointed guard dog, "tell that thing to back off."

"It's fine," Charles says, fondly amused despite himself.  He gently pushes Erik out of the way and holds the baby Raptor out towards Peter.  She squeaks, tail lashing, but then stills when Peter gently touches their noses together.

"That's so beautiful, man," Wade sobs, waving his arms around, "true love!  Doesn't it just make you want to host a taco dinner party?"

 _Taco dinner party_ , Erik mouths.

"I'm afraid she's too young to be dating," Charles says firmly, pulling his baby back to himself.  Peter doesn't seem to mind, he just snorts once and ambles—if a Velociraptor stalk can count as ambling—off towards the river for a drink.  "Wade, are you the man Logan says was carried off by the Velociraptors when they broke out of their enclosure?"

"Carried off?!" Wade exclaims.  "I rode majestically off into the sunset with my freedom-fighter brethren!" He pumps a fist into the air.  "LONG LIVE THE KING!"

Charles isn't sure what a king has to do with freedom, but he's not here to judge.

"Right," Erik says, giving Wade the same kind of wary look generally reserved for rabid raccoons, or even questionable refrigerator contents, "live long and prosper."

"Dude, I love Dumbledore," Wade says with a happy sigh, oblivious to the dying shrieks of Charles' inner nerd.

Erik's eye twitches.  He must have an inner nerd too.  Charles entertains a brief daydream of their inner nerds meeting up for tea and cakes decorated to resemble Storm Trooper helmets, among other things.  In his fantasy they also have a _Lord of the Rings_ marathon, because Charles has the firm belief that if you can find someone who is happily willing to sit with you through all three extended-cut movies of the _Lord of the Rings_ (and that’s not even getting into the currently far-off day in the future when all three of the extended-cut _Hobbit_ movies are released), you’d better hold onto that person very tightly and never, ever let them go.

Charles blinks.  Focus, Xavier.  “Wade, we’re trying to find our way back to the main lab facilities on the island.  Is there any way that you could help us?”

Wade stiffens immediately, his demeanor changing so drastically from his thus far friendly, happy manner that Charles does another brief, nonintrusive scan to make sure that he and Erik aren’t about to be attacked.  “You can’t make me go back, man.  You don’t know me.  You don’t know my life.”

“I could never begin to fathom you,” Charles reassures him.  This is somewhat truthful on the account that from the quick forays he’s taken into Wade’s mind, Charles has found the man’s mind to be utterly baffling and not a place he would ever care to stay very long in, though on the other hand it is a rather large understatement on Charles’ part because if he truly wished to, he _could_ dive deep into Wade’s mind and untangle him from the inside out, though to what end that would serve, Charles isn’t sure.

Charles just isn’t sure about a lot of things concerning Wade Wilson, but that’s probably for the best anyway.

Erik raises his eyebrows but tactfully says nothing.

Wade must take some comfort from it, though, because he relaxes again.  “The main base is, like, on the south part of the island.”  He points across the river.  “South is that way, man. The island isn’t really that big, so it’ll only be a few miles.”

Charles beams at him. “Thank you, Wade, that’s certainly helpful.”

 _No it was not_ , Erik interjects flatly.

 _It’s not like you even wanted to ask him for directions in the first place_ , Charles replies dismissively, _so you can’t be annoyed that they aren’t up to par._   His baby Velociraptor wiggles some more in his grasp so he gently soothes her.

“You can make it,” Wade tells them, “you just can’t ever give up.  Like a _Try_ -ceratops.”

Charles is torn between laughing and crying, while Erik mutters, “I’m not sure who I want to kill more for getting us into this mess, Shaw, Hank, or Logan.”

Wade gives a sharp whistle and Peter trots back over, holding still while Wade swings himself back up on top of his back, perched on the thick ridge of the Raptor’s backbone.  “You know James Logan Howlett?”

“ _James_?” Erik asks, extremely disappointed.  “I was hoping it’d be something like Jane.  Are you sure it isn’t Jane.”

“Yes, he’s actually out here with us,” Charles answers Wade while silently sending Erik the impression of stepping on his foot, “we just got separated from him when the Raptors started chasing us.  Which thank you, by the way, for saving us.”

“Those fuckin’ guys,” Wade says fondly, shaking his head with a loopy grin, “they’re real jokesters, aren’t they?”

“Hilarious,” Erik deadpans.

“Right?” Wade agrees with a happy sigh.  “Anyway, man, if you could do me a favor I’d be grateful as hell, dude.”

“Anything within our power,” Charles promises at once, ignoring Erik’s frantic glance.  Wade _did_ save their lives, after all.  They owe him something at least.

“Will you tell James that I’m sorry it never worked out,” Wade says, “and I wish that it would’ve, man, but it just wasn’t meant to be.”

“Were you two fu—” Erik starts to say incredulously but this time Charles actually _does_ step on his foot and Erik fortunately gets the point.

“We’ll tell him,” Charles replies, “we swear it.”

“A true bro,” Wade acknowledges gravely, and then without any warning he shouts, “WE RIDE NORTH!”

Charles jumps three feet into the air at least and Erik looks like he’s just barely restrained himself from reflexively decapitating Wade with his machete—honestly, they were just chased by six Velociraptors and one Tyrannosaurs rex so they’re both a _little_ jumpy—but Peter takes off immediately, bounding off back into the trees with Wade astride him like a true dinosaur cowboy.

“Well,” Erik says after a few moments of silence filled only by the quiet rushing of the water, “I’m not sure anymore what’s more insane about this place, the fact that dinosaurs exist or that _he_ exists.”

“Wade,” Charles replies immediately with all the certainty of knowing first-hand how exactly the thought processes of Wade Wilson run, “definitely Wade.”

“ _Cheep_.”

 

 

 

X

 

_"THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE HIGHLANDER!"_


	5. Miocene

X

 

It is well past nightfall when Charles makes Erik stop for the night, thoroughly fed up with slipping and tripping every five inches as they attempt to pick their way through the dense undergrowth of the wild, unkempt jungle in the dark.

“I’m not nocturnal,” Charles says matter-of-factly at the end of his speech which he presented his case, citing several examples from key case studies and scientific journals.  “I may be a mutant but I have not developed eyes suited for seeing through the dark, and neither have you.  At this rate, one or both of us is going to get hurt.”  He nods once, satisfied with himself.  “And that’s why we should stop.”

“And what exactly are we going to do?” Erik asks dryly, along with a few muttered curses as he gets tangled up in the clinging fronds of a fern.  The poor, unsuspecting fern that only wanted to be friends is quickly taken care of with a few swings of his machete.  Or at least Charles thinks that’s what he’s doing.  Erik could be dancing an interpretive samba while baking a soufflé for all Charles can see.  “I don’t know about you, but I seem to have forgotten my sleeping bag.”

“It’s hardly going to be like camping anyway,” Charles points out, “we probably shouldn’t even build a fire, even though a little light wouldn’t go amiss.”

“No,” Erik agrees quickly, “who knows what that’ll attract.”

He comes to a stop so abruptly that Charles walks right into him, his face hitting the metallokinetic in the back, right between his shoulder blades.  “Mmph.”

“Er, sorry.”  Erik turns and awkwardly finds Charles’ arm in the dark, keeping him from toppling over completely.  His hand is large and warm despite the chill settling across the jungle.  It’s definitely not cold, but compared to the hot stickiness of the day it might as well be snowing.

The baby Velociraptor that Charles cradles in his arms cheeps at the sudden intrusion, squirming in Charles’ grasp as he struggles to contain her.  “Shh,” he soothes her, stroking the little ridge of her spine because he doesn’t quite trust himself to not poke her eyes out if he tries to pet her head, “it’s alright, darling.  I know it’s been a long day.”

Erik withdraws his hand as if he’s actually been bitten, taking a step back.  “Our best bet is to find a tree and get off the ground for the night.  But I don’t know how you’ll climb with that thing.”

Charles frowns.  “ _She’s_ coming with us,” he says pointedly, clutching her closer now that she’s settled again.  He can feel her nipping lightly at his shirt collar, chewing on the end.  “She’s probably hungry, though.”

“You’ve got ten fingers,” Erik says pleasantly, “pick which one you like the least.”

Charles rolls his eyes until he remembers that Erik’s probably just as blind as he is right now, so he adds an exasperated sigh to carry his point across.  “There has to be something we can do.  Some small form of prey we can trap or catch for her.  She’s a newborn, she’s probably starving.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, I haven’t developed night vision either,” Erik answers, “so it’s going to have to wait for morning.”

“So we’ll try in the morning?” Charles asks brightly.

“What,” Erik says.

“That’s perfect, we can start looking first thing in the morning,” Charles says, perfectly aware of how he’s steamrolling right over Erik.  It’s good for him.  Character building.  It’ll prepare him for the four or possibly five children that they’re going to adopt once they get married because yes, Charles has decided that Erik is The One.  He’s been thinking about it all evening as the sun slowly sank beneath the trees and then the horizon.

Erik may be grumpy and a bit of a misanthrope, but his intentions are well-meaning (especially the part where he wants to ravish Charles six ways to next Tuesday, which Charles is completely on board with and alright maybe he peeked a little bit but he gets the feeling Erik won’t mind once faced with Charles’ naked, waiting ass) and deep down he does have a good heart.  Charles knows it.  Erik is a good man, despite his admittedly negative slant on life, but Charles knows better—there’s still a sense of humor under there.  And as long as that still lives, Charles knows that Erik isn’t as bad as he views himself at all.

Charles is also a hopeless romantic, but he’s accepted this about himself in the same manner he accepts that his eyes are blue and his hair starts to curl when it gets longer.

“Fine,” Erik says with a heavy sigh, sounding very put upon, but beyond that Charles can feel his grudging acceptance, “we’ll feed it in the morning.  One Happy Meal for the baby lizard.”

Charles grins, and accompanies it with a warm burst of affection that he carefully pushes towards Erik, glad now for the dark to hide his blush.  He’s always been clumsy with romantic overtures, but there’s nothing like being somewhat lost in a jungle on a barrier island full of dinosaurs—some of them which yes, he will finally admit, will happily eat them—to give him courage.

Erik shifts a little, probably still getting used to the whole telepathy thing but he honestly _is_ trying, which is another thing about him that has Charles’ heart melting like a sundae on a hot day: extremely goopy, sticky, and sugary.

“Right,” Erik says, but he sends Charles back the vague sensation of patting his shoulder.  It’s inelegant and halting, rather like trying to watch a YouTube video that refuses to fully load, but it’s Erik _trying_ , and that’s what counts.

Maybe it is a bit fast, Charles thinks a little dazedly as Erik starts talking about specific kind of tree they really need to find despite the darkness, but there’s nothing like the near-death experience of almost being eaten to speed things along.

Besides, if they do make it off this island in one piece, they’ll have all the time in the world.  Earth’s been spinning through space for close to five billion years now, and although there have been a few bumps in the road along the way, it’s not going anywhere for a few billion years still to come.

 

X

 

Mortimer Toynbee grumbles to himself as he struggles to untangle his wild mess of keys hanging in a bunch off his faded lanyard, dropping it twice before he’s finally able to dig out the right key that he needs, a gleaming little silver one that is otherwise unmarked.

At least he thinks it’s the right one.  They all kind of look like that.

He jams the key into to the slot, and fortunately the key gods are smiling down upon him because the lock turns cooperatively, allowing him to swing the panel of the circuit breaker that hangs off the side of the Velociraptor tank.  They don’t pay him enough to get near these things, he thinks sourly as he checks each of the breakers.  Give him a toilet brush and a toilet bowl and tell him to clean any day, but this?  He’s seen what happens to the cows they put in here.

Something in the bushes behind him rustles.

He whirls around.  There’s nothing.  Of course there’s nothing.  All of the Velociraptors are _inside_ the tank, after all.  He’s safe out here.  That’s what they told him.

He turns back around, slamming the panel shut.  This place is creepy at night.  It’s creepy during the _day_.  He’s not sure about this whole dinosaur thing.  Were they even real in the first place?  Seems doubtful.  He shoves his keys and lanyard back into his pocket with a loud jingle.  It’s probably just some alien conspiracy.  Or really large rats.

Mortimer Toynbee turns around, having utterly failed to hear the rustling behind him getting louder and louder, and is therefore completely shocked when he finds himself face-to-face with something that is less like a very large rat and more like a hungry Velociraptor.

The toilets will never be cleaned at this rate, he thinks mournfully, and that becomes the least of his problems shortly thereafter.

 

X

 

Erik is fucked.  Well and truly fucked.

If he's honest, he's been fucked ever since he laid eyes on one Charles Xavier, sitting across from him in the helicopter with his nose buried in _Game of Thrones_ , fucked since the first time he made eye contact with those brilliant blue eyes and took in those sinfully red lips, fucked since Charles held that damn Velociraptor in his arms and refused to let go.

Well.  Metaphorically, of course.  Erik hasn't gotten laid in a depressingly long time, but he's hoping that will change.

If they could only get off this damn island.

He doesn't realize the exact extent of how much he's fucked when he wakes up in the early morning light of dawn, curled around Charles in the little rocky hollow they'd stumbled upon by sheer luck last night in the pitch black.  Originally he'd wanted to find a tree, so they could get up somewhere elevated high, but it'd been impossible to tell in the dark which tree would be suitable enough, let alone one that Charles would be able to climb while carrying his little bundle of terror.  Literally running into the massive boulder with the little hollowed out center that at one point had probably been somebody else's home had been a staggering relief: even Erik, who'd meant to stay up and keep watch for as long as possible, had dropped right off out of sheer exhaustion.

Charles had fallen asleep right in the middle of an explanation about how their boulder might have possibly came to be—Erik can vaguely recall something about the island's shield volcano, multiple lava flows, and _thoeleiitic mafic basalt_ —and now in the light of dawn Erik can't look away from him while he continues to sleep, curled into Erik like he belongs there and breathing softly, his already boyish face even younger with the slackness of deep sleep.

At the time Erik couldn't even bring himself to be annoyed at how the baby lizard is curled up in a tight little ball in between them, little nose tucked under one of Charles' limp hands.

Charles had been completely relaxed, his knees pressed against Erik's and it would have been so easy for Erik to throw one of his own legs over him or even an arm to pull him closer.  This is when the first creeping tendrils of _I'm fucked_ had began to creep into his mind, but he hadn't realized it just yet.

It'd gotten stronger when, upon Charles' awakening, Erik had actually agreed to go looking for breakfast for the both of them—something he would have offered to do anyway, thank you very much—but had also promised to scrounge something up for the lizard.  The things he fucking does for Charles, he'd thought as he'd spent a good fifteen minutes following rustling sounds through the dewy undergrowth, soaking himself thoroughly until he'd finally found the little rodent creature responsible for making them.  Erik had made quite a mess by granting it a swift death via decapitation with his machete and only afterwards realizing that he still had to carry it all the fucking way back to where Charles waited with his _precious baby_.

Charles' smile upon his return, bright enough to power the entire southern hemisphere, had definitely made the whole thing worth it.  Even if watching the little Velociraptor rip apart the rodent carcass with a chorus of the loud snap of bones shattering beneath those lethal teeth had been nauseating.  It had even presumed enough to jump up on top of his shoulder with the bloody thing still dangling from its mouth.  After that Erik hadn't really touched the pathetic amount of berries-that-are-hopefully-not-toxic-to-humans that he'd scrounged up for Charles and himself.

The berries had stained Charles' lips an even darker red, and at that point Erik had thought vehemently, _oh fuck_.

The final straw had come later in the morning, when they'd reached another wide, meandering river that trickled by serenely.  They'd stopped for a break, Erik sinking down right on the smooth-pebbled shore to rest his feet, checking the edge of his machete instinctively for continued razor-sharpness, but then when he'd looked up and caught sight of Charles, illuminated by the sun reflecting brightly off the surface of the water and laughing at the little Raptor splashing through the shallows chasing minnows, he'd been overcome by such a strong surge of _wantprotectkeep **mine**_ that for a moment he'd been breathless, frozen in place where he'd sat.

Charles Xavier has done nothing but drive Erik up the wall ever since they first met approximately one day ago under possibly the sketchiest circumstances without counting some kind of drug deal, but Erik has never known another human being on this planet besides his own mother who he would ever consider fighting off a Tyrannosaurus rex for—hell, for Charles, he'd fight off _two_.

Erik still recalls what he'd let slip the day before, and ever since he's been trying to write it off as something he'd said in the heat of the moment when he'd been under a lot of pressure while also stressed the fuck out, but now as he watches Charles tenderly take care of a little monster whose muzzle is still bloodstained from breakfast, Erik realizes how well and truly fucked he is, because he's in love with Charles Xavier.

Something tells him that he should have seen this coming—he’s definitely wanted to sleep with Charles since first laying eyes on him, at the very least—but it just feels so _abrupt_.  Erik couldn't be struggling more than if a giant Pterodactyl swooped down out of the sky and picked him up in an attempt to feed him to its young.

"Everything alright?" Charles asks him, carrying the little menace back over to where Erik sits.  Right.  Telepath.  He can probably tell that Erik is having a mental crisis even without directly reading Erik's mind.

"Fine," Erik says, hoping that he doesn't sound as helpless as he thinks he does.  Judging by Charles' brief concerned look, he doesn't manage this.  At all.

"Right, do you mind holding her then?" Charles asks hopefully, and before Erik can even come up with a response he's suddenly holding a wriggling little Velociraptor.  "Just for a minute!  I want to wash my face and take a drink but I don't want to leave her unattended by the water.  Thanks!"  And then he's off, headed back down to the river.

Erik stares after him.  He's holding the Raptor out awkwardly in both hands a foot out from his body, and it _cheeps_ at him to recall his attention.  They look at each other for a moment, Erik half-waiting for it to lean over and bite him while it tilts its head at him quizzically.

"I'm fucked," he confides in it because why the hell not, everything else on this island is insane so he might as well join in.

It _chirps_ this time, blinking up at him.  Fuck his life even more; it's starting to look cute.

"What am I supposed to do?" Erik asks it, lifting it up a little so that they're more on eye-level with each other.  It gives a small trill.  Charles had decided on its name earlier during breakfast, but Erik had been too busy staring at his lips to hear what was actually being said.  "Say something like 'oh, by the way, I know we're lost in the jungle on an island that's infested with dinosaurs'—which should be impossible, by the way, no offense—and then drop the L-word?"

The little Raptor reaches down, extending its neck out as far as it can go, and closes its fangs on Erik's forearm, biting him gently.  It gnaws on him for a few moments, never hard enough to draw blood even though Erik can feel the tiny little pinpricks of its needle-like teeth, all while looking up at him with innocent little eyes.

"Charles would say you're teething," Erik tells it dryly, "but you and I both know that you're just practicing eating me for later."

The little lizard lets go of him, widening its jaw just enough so none of its teeth scrape him as it withdraws, and oh god is it _purring_?

"We're not friends," he tells it sternly so that they're clear on this subject, "just because I'm holding you as a favor of Charles and happened to confide in you doesn't make us friends.  I could've said the same things to my machete.  You just happened to be here.  As a favor for Charles."

It's _looking_ at him and Erik's starting to get a little creeped out so he casts his gaze around for Charles, finding him just as the telepath is pushing himself back up to his feet, wiping damp hands on his pants.  Erik's never been shy about admitting to himself that he's been attracted to Charles' body from the start, so he takes the opportunity now to admire Charles' lithe but compact form hidden beneath his dirty, stained clothes.  Charles is well-built, from the slope of his shoulders to his thicker but toned thighs belonging to legs that are long for his body, even if height-wise he's still got nothing on Erik.  His back is nice, too, starting wide at the top because of his broad shoulders but tapering down to a fit, trim waist—he’s not as skinny as Erik but, well, no one really is anyway.

Charles bends over to examine something on the bank, and Erik nearly sighs aloud in appreciation for that fine ass he's been granted a bird's-eye view of.  Charles had fit so nicely curled towards him this morning, so Erik can only imagine how perfectly they'd slot together with Charles' ass right up against his—

The Velociraptor squeaks accusingly, wiggling in his hands.

"Mind your own business," Erik tells it with a glare.  He quickly looks back at Charles but the telepath has already straightened again, stretching, which is also a nice view but not the _same_.  He treats the little shit still squirming around with a flat look.  "I don't care if you're supposedly a girl, there's a bro code concerning these types of things and you just violated it."

A shadow is all the warning they get before a giant Pterodactyl swoops down out of the sky, dropping down on Charles like an anvil on a cartoon character.  Charles lets out a cry of surprise and fear as it wraps its huge, foot-like talons beneath his armpits and then with two powerful pumps of its enormous, leathery wings the Pterodactyl lifts back off into the sky, dragging Charles up with it.

Aw _hell_ no.

"Charles!" Erik shouts, scrambling back up to his feet.  He nearly forgets that he's still holding the baby Raptor before he quickly puts it down, saying sharply, " _Stay_ ," and pointing at it to assert his authority, and then he's sprinting off towards the riverbank where the massive prehistoric bird with a neck like a fucking giraffe is struggling to gain altitude with its struggling prey.

"Erik!" Charles shouts back, panicking as he kicks wildly, desperately trying to yank himself loose from the talons wrapped like vises around both of his biceps.  The Pterodactyl beats its wings harder, rising up into the air and swaying out over the river.

"Hang on, I've got you!" Erik calls, snatching up his machete.  He can't let the Pterodactyl get too high or Charles won't survive the fall.  "Hold your breath!"

"What?" Charles shrieks, but then it's too late.

Erik uses his power to throw his machete like a javelin, aiming straight for the Pterodactyl's straining chest muscles.  He feels the impact as the metal slices into thick skin, knocking the wind out of the monster's lungs more than doing any real damage, and causing it to let out a piercing screech, veering sharply and dropping Charles as it rears back in midair, wings snapping furiously back and forth as it tries to keep itself from crashing.

"Aaahhhh!" Charles screams as he falls, plummeting straight down into the river with a huge splash.

The Pterodactyl catches an updraft and soars off into the sky, lighter without its burden and still screeching angrily even as it beats a hasty retreat, but Erik hardly cares as he splashes into the shallows and then takes in a deep gulp of air before diving into the deeper part of the river.

What the fuck are the odds, Erik thinks as he kicks his way out into the channel, peering through the murky green water in search of Charles.  He wonders if Charles has a second mutation that just lights him up as a signal beam for trouble and danger.  He's lucky Erik is insane enough to be in love with him.

He finds Charles struggling his way back up to the surface so Erik grabs him by the arm—carefully in case he's been hurt by the _third_ type of dinosaur that's tried to eat him in the past day and a half—and pulls him up.  They break the surface at the same time, Erik gulping in air again while Charles coughs harshly, flailing a bit to stay afloat before Erik grasps him gently, kicking for them both.

"Easy, I've got you," he says, aiming for nonchalant and cool like he does this kind of shit every day, no big deal, "just get your breath back.  I won't let you sink."

 _Thanks_ , Charles presses into his mind, coughing once or twice more before his breathing starts evening out.  _I’m fine, I’m not hurt.  I swear I know how to swim, that was just a little..._

"Startling?" Erik offers dryly.

"Extremely," Charles agrees in a hoarse voice.  He puts his hands on Erik's shoulders and starts kicking slowly too, treading water along with Erik so that he's no longer a dead weight.  His hair is plastered down against his head, making him look like a drowned puppy.  Or kitten.  Or some other small, pitiful animal that Erik has no real experience with anyway and usually does his best to avoid.

"Well, uh," Erik says, practically a poet, "I'm glad you didn't get carried off and eaten.  I don't know who would've taken care of the lizard in your place."

"Honestly, Erik, I told you her name is Dany, after Daenerys from _Game of Thrones_.  But I'm sure she would've been fine in your care had the Quetzalcoatlus been successful," Charles says confidently, "I know you'd take good care of her."

"The _what_?"

"Quetzalcoatlus.”

"That sounds like a rare but lethal disease.  Who _names_ these things?"

“They were originally alive in the Late Cretaceous of North America and are one of the largest known flying animals of all time.  It’s fascinating that Hank chose to clone them.”

“‘Fascinating’ is not the word I would personally choose.”

Charles laughs, eyes sparkling with amusement.  "Thank you for rescuing me, Erik."

Erik immediately adverts his gaze and coughs.  "It was nothing."  He grimaces.  "I've lost my machete, though.  I have no idea where it went after I threw it at the—thing.  I can't sense it."  He's actually a little sad.  That piece of metal has been through hell with him and now it's gone, even when he casts his senses out around them hopefully.  He took out a Velociraptor with that machete.  Now he feels like Chuck Noland watching helplessly as Wilson floats away.  Fortunately he's in enough control of himself to not start shouting and weeping.

He didn't even get a chance to name it, anyway.

"Well, hopefully we're getting close to the lab," Charles says consolingly, "and hopefully we won't run into anything else where you'd need it."

"I don't know," Erik says skeptically, "this is you we're talking about.  You’ve attracted a lot of trouble lately."

Charles flushes slightly, his expressive skin tinged red.  "You've been here the whole time too, it could very well be _you_."

He might have a point.  Erik had just been thinking about Pterodactyls swooping down right before Charles had been snatched up.  Maybe _he's_ the one with a second mutation, not Charles.  Huh.

"Nope," Erik says calmly, because if they're going to get technical about it he'd been thinking of a Pterodactyl, not a Que-Quetzal-Quetzalcoathanger- _whatever_ , "definitely not me."

Charles makes a face at him but then smiles, soft at the edges.  "Regardless, I'm glad you're here," he says, a curling flicker of warmth brushing against Erik's mind, "I don't think I would've made it quite this far without you."

"You'd still be trying to save every damn baby dinosaur in the forest and then get eaten," Erik mutters, and to his ultimate horror he can feel himself flushing.  "Someone has to keep you alive."

They fall into a sort of charged silence, holding each other's gaze as they tread water.  Erik is hyperaware of Charles' hands on his shoulders and his own hands at Charles' waist, and how with every gentle kick their legs brush together, light and teasing touches underwater.  Charles is right here, looking up at him with a sort of tentative expectancy.  It wouldn't take much to lean just a little more forward.  He can do it right now.  He can—

A low grunting sound makes both of them jolt in surprise, heads swiveling in search of whatever new danger is being thrown at them now.  On the opposite shore, towering duck-billed dinosaurs emerge from the trees, ambling down to the edge of the water.

"I didn't know those were that big," Erik admits, a little bit awed as Charles gasps in delight.  He knew dinosaurs were supposed to be big, but really only something like a Tyrannosaurs rex or a member of the long neck dinosaur family struck him as significantly larger than humans.  These duck bills, with their gracefully arched crests, have heads as big as he is— _heads_.  The rest of their massive, hulking bodies make him feel like an ant.

"Parasaurolophus," Charles says, grinning widely, "and supposedly thirty-three feet long, give or take."

"Supposedly?" Erik asks as the herd of ten or so spreads out along the bank, rooting around in the shallows for aquatic plants.  "I think this confirms it."

"I'd say so," Charles agrees.  He sighs happily.  "They're incredible.  Hank—Hank is _amazing_ for have created all this."

"Those ones are alright," Erik allows, because the jury's still out on Hank's mental capacities for ever considering Velociraptors and Tyrannosaurs rexes as a good idea.  He watches Charles observing the dinosaurs for a few moments longer, basking in the warm happiness the telepath is currently radiating, unconsciously or not.  The moment between them has passed, the opportunity lost, but Erik can't bring himself to mind.

There will be other opportunities.  There'd _better_ be.

"We should probably get out of the water," Charles says, reluctantly tearing his gaze away from the duck-billed dinosaurs.  "Better keep going."

"That and I wouldn't put it past Hank at this point to have also recreated some kind of ancient crocodile that happens to be the size of Rhode Island," Erik says flatly as they swim towards the other shore.  He says it mostly because he's actually surprised nothing yet has risen up from the depths of the river to try its luck at eating them, but also to get Charles to laugh.

He is far, far too pleased with himself when it works.

 

X

 

_The things he fucking does for Charles._

 

X

 

If all of the Earth’s 4.6 billion years of history were laid out in a standard 12-month calendar, it has been said that human beings would not appear until the twelfth stroke of midnight on January 1st of the next year, stumbling onto the scene out of breath and panting with a Starbucks latte clutched in one hand.  Considering how it’s been estimated that the first members of the human family lived in Africa about 6 or 7 million years ago while dinosaurs ruled the planet for over 160 million years, Charles can believe it.

It seems like an awful long time for life, the universe, and everything to be waiting around for two people to meet but Charles can’t help but feel that this is exactly what it’s been about all this time—one vast stretch of eternity until he and Erik happened to both answer the same sketchy newspaper ad in the back of the classifieds.  But really, he reasons, what _else_ could be the point?

“Nothing at all,” Charles says cheerfully to the baby Velociraptor curled happily in his arms, tiny claws tugging lightly on his shirt.

“Did you say something?” Erik asks over his shoulder, absently holding back a branch to keep it from snapping back into Charles’ face.  They’ve left the river behind, neither of them desiring another chance meeting with any more of the winged variety of dinosaurs, and Erik leads the way once again as they forge through the jungle, making good time.  It has to be close to noon, now, but they’ve covered a lot of ground—or at least it feels that way.

“Just talking to her,” Charles says quickly, hoisting Dany a little higher in explanation.  She trills helpfully and Charles rewards her with a pat.

“Ah,” Erik says, and hurriedly turns forward again.  Charles can feel his mind sliding away, refocusing on picking their route through the trees.

It’s a little frustrating, Charles admits to himself.  He’s not sure what’s holding either of them back from openly admitting _why yes, I think we should have sex and get married and become best friends_ when it has to be obvious even to Erik that they both want the same thing.  Charles has never been shy by any means at any point in his life, but yet he finds himself holding back from openly throwing himself at Erik.  In equal measure, Erik seems like the kind of person who has a list in his head of the things he likes, and once he likes a thing he’s not shy either about proclaiming this.

Charles wonders if this means that deep down, both of them are afraid of somehow screwing this up because for the first time, this is actually important.

“What’s that sound?” Erik asks reflexively, coming to a halt.

“More dinosaurs?” Charles suggests, trying not to sound too hopeful.  He stops too, listening intently beyond the omnipresent jungle noises of far-off shrieks, rustling leaves, and the drone of insects.

It takes him a couple moments but then his ears pick up on the long, slow tones that register so deeply on the octave scale that Charles is fairly certain that he’s only hearing half of the noises as they dip into decibels too low for his human ears and brain to process.

“It’s coming from over there,” Charles says, looking off to their right.  “Come on, Erik, let’s go see!”

“When has this ever gone well,” Erik mutters, but dutifully follows as Charles takes off through the bushes, trying to both move quickly and yet not make enough noise to wake the dead.

Charles follows the sounds for a few yards, and Dany perks up with interest, swiveling her head around to face their current direction of travel.  Charles almost trips over a branch when he takes a moment to admire how cute she is, and he can’t help the wave of fondness he feels when he catches Erik’s brief spike of alarm concerning his wellbeing.

And then he sees them.

Spread out through the trees and calmly munching on leaves is a family of Stegosaurus, their massive bony plates rising up high across their ridged backs, and spiked tails swaying back and forth idly.  Charles stops in his tracks, eyes going wide, hardly even noticing as Erik comes up beside him.

“Stegosaurus,” Charles breathes, unable to even come up with and articulate one of the hundreds of facts he has memorized about them in his sheer awe.

“Even _I_ know that,” Erik replies, but he sounds amused.

“I could never pick a favorite,” Charles explains in a hushed voice, usually more suitable for people standing in front of an old master’s painting in a very fancy museum setting, “between Stegosaurus or Ankylosaurus.  But god, Erik, they’re _right here_ , they’re _real_ —”  His voice cuts, unable to continue.

“That they are,” Erik agrees, giving his shoulder a small squeeze.  “I like Stegosaurus.  Something about those spikes.”

“Plates,” Charles corrects immediately because he truly can’t help himself, “seventeen separate, flat plates usually arranged in two rows that alternate.  And look how their hind legs are longer than their forelegs!  You don’t usually see that kind of arrangement because it’s so odd and doesn’t make much sense but for them it _works_.”

When he looks back over at Erik to make sure that Erik is really looking and taking this all in, he finds that instead Erik is watching _him_ , eyebrows slightly raised and otherwise looking like he’s trying hard not to smile.

Charles flushes immediately, of course, because his skin is fond of betraying him on a regular basis.  “They’re _incredible_ , alright?”

Erik nods in agreement, but he’s still not looking at the dinosaurs and Charles doesn’t have to check to get the feeling that Erik isn’t even thinking about the dinosaurs, which is a real shame but also makes Charles’ heart do strange little fluttering things in his chest.

“Charles,” Erik says very deliberately, and this is about when Charles realizes how close they’re standing together, Erik’s presence nearly overwhelming in the good sort of way in this proximity.

“Yes?” Charles asks after perhaps a beat too long, but Erik doesn’t even seem to notice, his eyes shifting down when Charles unconsciously licks his lips.

“I,” Erik begins haltingly, a little distracted, and Charles is nearly holding his breath in anticipation.  “I, um—”

_Boom.  Boom._

“No,” says Erik flatly in the tone of someone who is choosing to not believe concrete evidence of something even when all the facts are lined up and color-coded in front of them, just to be spiteful.

_Boom.  Boom._

“Why,” says Charles mournfully because not only is the moment gone so are the Stegosaurus, lumbering off deeper into the trees.

_Boom.  Boom._

“ _Cheep_ ,” says Dany, tucking her face into Charles’ shirt to hide.

_Boom.  Boom._

“ _Grrrrrrrrrrrrr_ ,” says the Tyrannosaurus Rex as it comes into view, every footstep shaking the ground as it stomps through the jungle.  It comes to a halt, sniffing the air like a particularly large bloodhound, and of course it ignores the scent of tasty Stegosaurus steaks and instead turns its massive head towards Charles and Erik, its jaws cracking open to reveal a ridiculous amount of large, jagged teeth.

“Fuck,” they say at the exact same time.


	6. Pliocene

 

X

“What if we stayed really, _really_ still.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard in my life, it’s already looking right at us.”

“What if it’s not hungry?”

“It’s drooling.  I’m pretty sure that’s the universal sign of ‘yes, hello, I’m starving, and oh by the way you look delicious.’”

“I’m trying to be positive, here, Erik.”

“ _Cheep_.”

Charles hugs Dany closer, hoping against hope that Velociraptors can’t smell fear, though given how they’re naturally a top predator and genetically engineered to be nightmare fuel—yes, he’ll admit it, he’s been chased by an entire pack of them so he could be considered an authority on this, actually—he’s fairly certain that to Dany’s little nose, he and Erik reek of it.

And to the Tyrannosaurus rex’s considerably larger nose, they probably smell like an appetizer.

“This is unfair,” Erik points out as their staring contest with the world’s fiercest predator stretches on, none of them making any movements quite yet, “the Stegosaurus were _right_ here.  They’re bigger than us.  Meatier.  More fulfilling.  We are scrawny and bony in comparison.”

“We also lack armored plates and spiked tails,” Charles points out helpfully even though he knows that it is probably not the time, “and we’re bite-size.”

“Wonderful,” Erik mutters, “I’m going to die and all my life has amounted to is being a fun-sized Snickers bar.”

“It could be worse,” Charles offers, edging a little closer so that their shoulders touch, “you could be a fun-sized Babe Ruth bar.”

That startles a short bark of laughter out of Erik, fortunately muted enough so that the T-rex isn’t provoked into attacking just yet, though it does start up a low, rumbling growl.  “Does anyone even like those?”

“I don’t think so,” Charles replies with a small shrug, and despite it all they share a quick, fleeting grin.

“Listen,” Erik says, and judging by the timbre of his thoughts Charles knows he’s about to say something incredibly ridiculous, “as soon as we start running, that thing is going to come after us.  We’re not going to make it very far.  But you could make it, I think, if I kept it distracted.”

“Absolutely not,” Charles snaps, trying to ignore the way his heart nearly stops, “you are _not_ sacrificing yourself for me, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in _my_ life.”

“You think I want to be eaten?” Erik demands, his voice riding the edge of turning shrill.  He clears his throat.  “Think of the little—Dany.  You’re obligated to carry her to safety.”

“Don’t make me choose between you and her,” Charles whispers, blinking a few times.  In his arms, Dany perks her head up at her name in Erik’s voice.  It’s the first time Erik’s actually said her name, and Charles sort of wants to laugh but he’s afraid that instead he might cry.  “Look, she likes when you say her name.  You can’t just say it once and then—and then leave.”

“Yes, well,” Erik mutters, flushing a little as he bends down slowly to pick up a rock, fingers clenched around it tightly.  “On the count of three, I want you to turn around and run.  Do not look back.”

“Wait,” Charles says, panicked, “don’t do this, Erik—”

“One,” Erik says resolutely, tossing the rock up once as he widens his stance a little, his thoughts practically shouting, _please run please run don’t stay run run get away be safe—_

“Please, Erik,” Charles says, not even ashamed at how his voice slips into begging, “I—”

“Two,” Erik interrupts, cocking his arm back and taking careful aim.  _Should’ve told you should’ve said something too late now better this way I’m sorry—_

“ _Erik_ ,” Charles says desperately, “I know this isn’t a good time but you can’t do this because—”

“Three!” Erik grunts, arm snapping forward and launching the rock straight at the Tyrannosaurus rex, at which point Charles says, at the exact same time:

“I love you.”

“ _What_ ,” Erik says blankly, and then his rock makes contact with the Tyrannosaurus rex’s face.

 _Oh,_ that’s _romantic_ , Charles tells him acridly, resorting to telepathy on the account of the T-rex throwing back its head with an ear-shattering roar, _I pour my heart out to you and all I get is a ‘what.’_

 _You can’t just spring this on me like this!_ Erik protests frantically.

 _It’s not like you gave me any choice!_   Charles retorts, glaring at him.

 _Alright, alright, I’m sorry_ , Erik says hurriedly, his thoughts flickering through several different emotions at once, _and for what it’s worth, I love you too._

Charles has previously resolved to be Mad at Erik for this, but now he can’t stop the wide, probably dopey grin from spreading across his face, even as the T-rex lowers its head and charges at them with a guttural snarl.  _Really?_

 _Indisputably_ , Erik informs him gravely, and then pulls him forward into a kiss.

Death is bearing down on them in the form of several thousand pounds of giant lizard but Charles has several fireworks going off inside him as he leans up into the kiss, parting his lips with a happy sigh as Erik fists a hand in his hair at the back of his head while his other hand drops down to press against Charles’ spine.  Dany is squeaking and wiggling where she’s trapped between them but all Charles can focus on is Erik’s possessive hold on him and the way Erik kisses him, whole and consuming, his tongue slipping into Charles’ mouth to lay claim as their lips slide together, his thoughts thrumming with pleasure as Charles brushes their minds together.

It is without a doubt the best kiss Charles has ever received in his soon-to-be-expired life.

The Tyrannosaurus rex is only feet away when with a wild yell Logan drops down from out of nowhere, claws extended, and lands on its back.  The T-rex gives another deafening roar as his claws sink in, coming to a lurching halt that shakes the ground and thrashing wildly, long, thick tail snapping trees in half.

“Run, you fucking idiots!” Logan shouts, and really, he could’ve been a _bit_ more polite about it.

They need no further invitation, however, so Charles shifts Dany into just one arm and grabs Erik’s offered hand and together they take off into the jungle, running as fast as they can.  Behind them, the T-rex lets out another angry snarl and lumbers after them, staggering back and forth through the trees as it tries to both chase them and throw Logan off at the same time.

“This way!” Erik shouts, tugging Charles’ hand, changing their direction to a new angle as they crash through the undergrowth.  At first Charles isn’t sure where Erik intends to lead them as he stumbles and nearly wipes out completely, Erik’s iron grip on his hand really the only thing keeping him on his feet, and then he sees the huge, fallen tree, its trunk so wide that even on its side it stands taller than Charles.

“I’m not going to be able to climb over that!” Charles yelps even as they continue to pelt at full speed towards the enormous log, the T-rex lurching after them.

“You won’t have to,” Erik says grimly, and then before Charles can ask him what the _hell_ he means by that Erik leans over as they run and scoops Charles up bridal-style, ignoring Charles’ rather undignified squawk and hardly breaking his stride as they hurtle towards the log and oh god they’re going to—

Erik leaps into the air and Charles feels an odd lift, and they soar up far higher than any normal human being could jump while carrying another person and a small dinosaur, sailing up and over the fallen tree and touching down lightly on the other side.

“You can _fly_?” Charles demands even as Erik sinks down with his back to the tree trunk, panting. Charles scrambles sideways off him, clutching Dany tightly, but looks up at Erik in amazement.  “Erik, that’s _incredible_.”

“It’s just hovering,” Erik gets out between his panting, but his thoughts ripple with manly pride, pleased with himself.

They both jerk their heads up to look as the Tyrannosaurus rex comes to a halt on the other side of their log, roaring in frustration and swinging its head back and forth wildly.  Logan still clings determinedly to its back, his colorful curses audible in between the T-rex’s snarls as it tries again to shake him loose.

 _I don’t think it knows we’re here_ , Erik says, craning his neck, _so if Logan can keep it distracted long enough, we can—_

Charles’ only warning is Erik’s spike of alarm and he can’t stop himself from letting out a wordless cry of alarm as the T-rex suddenly pitches its head forward and down, finally dislodging Logan and sending him flying.  Logan crashes into a tree but it hardly seems to faze him, picking himself right up and shimmying up the trunk towards the lower branches even as the T-rex closes in on him.

“Oh my god,” Charles says with wide eyes, “is he going to—?”

Logan pulls himself up onto the first branch and whirls around, coiling his leg muscles and launching himself directly at the Tyrannosaurus rex’s face just as it reaches him, letting out a mighty bellow that could possibly be the loudest roar they’ve heard yet.  He rakes his claws against the T-rex’s face, missing the wide-open jaws and razor sharp teeth by millimeters as he sails past, and the T-rex lets out a piercing shriek that shakes leaves off the rest of the surrounding trees.

"Never again," Erik says, flopping back down against the log for a moment to rub his eyes, "is Hank allowed to be in a laboratory unsupervised.  Ever."

"Darling, please,” Charles says with a fond smile, still shaken but trying to get his adrenaline levels to go down a little, “from now on Hank's job will be serving me tea and fetching crisps."

Erik lowers his hands and favors Charles with a Look.  "... Shut up, Khaleesi."

" _Squeak_ ," Dany chimes in, scratching lightly at Charles’ arm.

“I _knew_ you knew the books!” Charles says triumphantly, grinning at Erik.

“I might’ve seen the show at some point,” Erik mutters, which Charles confirms by gleefully diving into Erik’s head to view the memory the metallokinetic is recalling, which appears to involve a large leather couch, a magenta duvet, Netflix, a bag of chocolate chips, and a tub of strawberry ice cream.

“Have you ever seen _Lord of the Rings_?” Charles asks him very, very seriously.

Before Erik can answer they’re interrupted by a particularly loud roar from the T-rex, and they risk peering over the top of the log again to see what’s happening.  As they watch, Logan and the T-rex face off, both of them covered in an alarming amount of blood, though Charles suspects that it’s mostly the T-rex’s as it has several large gashes along its flanks and belly.

“Oh,” Charles says, very suddenly realizing what is about to happen even as Logan crosses his claws in front of himself and starts to run at the T-rex, “I don’t want to be eaten but I don’t want for it to have to die.”

“Survival of the fittest,” Erik says grimly, but he reaches over and puts an arm around Charles, tugging him close and adding a tad more gently, “Don’t watch.”

So Charles scoots closer and tucks his face into Erik’s shoulder and distracts himself from several ghastly sounds by thinking about how often Darwin’s most famous quote is often misconstrued.  It shouldn’t be _survival of the fittest_ ; it should be _adapt to survive_.

Evolution is a funny thing, he muses, as it’s allowed for a human being brilliant enough to recreate dinosaurs, which some believe were destroyed in order to make way for humanity in the first place.  Someone somewhere, Charles is certain, is currently having a jolly good laugh.

He’s not aware of the silence until it’s practically ringing in his ears, and he lifts his head slowly, looking up at Erik questioningly.

Erik nods.  “It’s safe.”

Together they clamber back up to their feet, and this time Erik only puts an arm around Charles’ waist in order to lift them up and over the fallen log, setting them both down gently on the other side.  The sight that greets them is both horrifying and astounding in equal measures: Logan sits on top of the fallen T-rex, which is definitely very, very dead, and he looks down at them with the distinct air of the Supremely Unimpressed as he pulls out a cigar from his tattered cargo pants, sticking one end in his mouth.

Charles carefully puts Dany down, letting her totter off as he slowly approaches the fallen Tyrannosaurus, mouth slightly open in awe.  “Um.  Thank you, Logan.  For saving us.”

Logan’s eyes follow Dany as she creeps up on the T-rex curiously, but as soon as Charles speaks his eyes snap back to him and Erik.  He snorts.  “What the fuck, Chuck,” he says, “I leave you alone for five goddamn minutes and you disappear?”

“There was, um,” Charles begins haltingly, suddenly too embarrassed to admit that he’d started the whole thing by falling down an unfortunately-placed hill, “an incident.”

“We were attacked by Velociraptors,” Erik snaps, coming to the rescue, “and we didn’t really feel like sticking around to wait for you to join the party.”  It does not escape Charles’ notice that Erik has also omitted Charles’ inopportune cliff-diving experience, and for that alone he could kiss him all over again.

“I see,” Logan says in the tone of voice of someone who really doesn’t, as his eyes track back to Dany as the little Velociraptor tries to take a bite out of the T-rex’s nose.

Charles puts one hand flat against the T-rex’s flank, marveling at the thick, rough scales.  He’s standing next to a Tyrannosaurus rex.  Granted only a few minutes ago it was trying to eat him, but now he’s _touching_ it.

He has a small moment of silence for his inner kindergartener, who has abruptly died of happiness.

“I thought you said the T-rexes lived in the northern part of the island,” Erik accuses, eyes narrowed, “why the hell was one all the way down here?”

Logan lifts one shoulder in a very unconcerned half-shrug.  “Expanding the territory?  Shopping around for a new hunting ground?  Do I look like a damn giant lizard expert to you?”

“We crashed near the northern part of the island, too,” Charles suggests, “that might have alerted it, somehow, and it came to investigate.  And then started…tracking us.”

Erik looks mildly horrified at the thought of the T-rex hunting them all this time, which Charles confesses isn’t giving him any form of pleasant feelings either.

“Oh,” he says, alighting on a new topic, removing his hand from the T-rex’s hide and stepping back so that he can see Logan.  “We met Wade.”

Logan cocks an eyebrow.  “So that dumbass is actually still alive, eh?”

“Yes, he is,” Erik says, failing spectacularly at trying not to sound like a melodramatic villain who has finally hatched his ultimate evil plan, “and he wanted us to tell you, _James_ , that he’s sorry that it didn’t work out.  It just wasn’t meant to be.”

Logan hardly bats an eye.  “Well of course putting Velociraptors on a vegan diet ain’t gonna work out, don’t need to be a rocket surgeon to tell ya that.”

 _Rocket surgeon_ , Charles mouths to himself in wonder.

“So,” Erik says casually, “he wasn’t actually talking about your secret affair.”

“The fuck, bub, you eat the wrong kind of mushrooms?”

“Literally everything about this place sucks,” Erik declares, which kind of makes Charles roll his eyes because it’s not as if Erik hadn’t already decided that the moment he set foot outside the helicopter, but then Erik surprises him by catching his eye, and giving him a slow, sultry grin that is probably illegal in eleven countries, does funny things to Charles’ stomach, and makes him go rather weak in the knees.  _Except you, of course_.

Charles is aware that Logan is giving them both a funny look and that the burning sensation across his cheeks is definitely not from the sun, but the look on Erik’s face after Charles tells him, _well I don’t know, that can be arranged_ , makes it entirely worth it.

 

X

 

_"... Shut up, Khaleesi."_

 

X

 

Erik is the first one to sense the helicopters, long before they’re audible to Logan and his apparently extremely acute sense of hearing or visible to Charles, who outclasses them both in the department of mental facilities but lacks incredible wombat ears or whatever it is that Logan has.  Erik can feel the huge chunks of flying metal drawing steadily closer, which isn’t surprising, but what _is_ curious is the fact that there are helicopter _s_ , plural, more than one, currently cutting through the air towards them.

“But why would there be more than one?” Charles wonders after Erik details this aloud.  He’s a little out of  breath due to the pace Logan’s been leading them through the jungle at, claiming that Hank’s lab is close—even Erik is starting to feel slightly winded just trying to keep up, and he likes to think that he’s in pretty good shape.

“Beats me,” Logan says with a shrug, and good lord have his sideburns always been that prominent?  Erik thinks that they could actually sit up and solve simple math equations.

…He may or may not still be a little bitter over the fact that he _hadn’t_ uncovered Logan’s—or James’ or whoever the hell he is—secret, forbidden mercenary sex life with Wade or Deadpond or whatever the hell the crazy on the Velociraptor liked to call himself.  Erik mourns the fact that he can’t openly mock Logan in this regard, so he supposes it’s natural that he’s settling for picking out other things instead.

Like that haircut.  Has he mentioned the haircut?

“It only took one helicopter to bring Mr. Shaw, Erik, and I out to the island,” Charles continues, a little worried.  Erik is about 90% certain that Charles is ignoring his thoughts on purpose.  “I wonder if something’s happened.”

“Hank finally realized that his own creations will happily eat him?” Erik asks dryly.

 _You’re going to feel awful if Hank was actually eaten_ , Charles tells him primly, mentally sticking his tongue out at Erik.  Underneath that Erik can feel a small current of Charles’ genuine concern, so he relents and sighs.

 _Fine, I will feel marginally bad_ , he replies, and distantly wonders if this is what it’s going to be like for the rest of his damn life; Charles guilting him into things like _feelings_.

For some reason, that’s the thought Charles chooses to pick up on and he beams, and honestly the Sun can just pack up and leave the solar system in shame at this point, because Erik will _never_ be over how brightly Charles can smile.

 _The rest of your life?_   Charles asks tentatively after a few moments in which Erik is pretty sure they spend the entirety of looking at each other with equally dopey, glazed over expressions.  They’re probably lucky neither of them have walked into a tree.

 _Huh_ , Erik thinks, mostly to himself but it’s loud enough for Charles to hear too, _I did say that_.  He gives a mental shrug.  _We survived being eaten far more times than normal people on average usually have to, so I figure we might be in it for the long haul_.  Erik’s not good at relationships and nor is he good at people, but this feels right.  It’s easy for him to say it and to think it, to lay it out for Charles to see that he means every single word.

It is also amazing how Charles’ eyes can go from hopeful to outright porn star bedroom eyes, and this time Erik really does walk smack into a large fern because holy _shit_.

 _You’d better flag down those helicopters_ , Charles tells him, amping up the British accent to astronomical levels of posh, _because as soon as we get back to the mainland, you’re going to take me back to your hotel room and do everything you’ve imagined doing to me since we first met_.  Then he smiles innocently, adjusts his hold on Dany, and steps past Erik where he’s come to a dead halt, hips and ass swaying invitingly on purpose.  Dany peers back at him over Charles’ shoulder, letting out a short trill.

Erik doesn’t even care that he’s probably being laughed at by the little cretin, because his brain is still stuck in an endless loop of all the things he _has_ imagined doing to Charles thus far and dear god he might want to die a little because they are nowhere near that hotel room yet.

“Disgusting,” Logan says loudly, even though what the fuck, there’s no way he has any idea what was just happened because he’s in the lead and that conversation had been entirely silent.

Unless—and Erik resists the urge to cringe—the man can smell his arousal.  Or his eyebrows and sideburns combined grant him strange telepathic powers, which actually isn’t as far-fetched as it may sound.  Have you _seen_ those things?  Erik shudders.

The helicopters pass by overhead without seeing them the first time, mostly due to the fact that they’re still hidden by the dense trees and Erik thinks Charles would frown if he resorted to simply plucking one out of the sky.  He’s pretty sure that he could do it, but it’s not like there’d be a good place to set it down anyway.

“Looks like they’re headed for the lab,” Logan says after six helicopters have soared past noisily, sending the upper canopies of the trees into a wild flurry, “let’s find some open ground so we can catch ’em on their way back.”

As if they hadn’t been traveling quickly enough the first time, Logan practically pushes them into double-time, loping through the trees and undergrowth easily while Erik and Charles lag somewhat behind.  Normally, Erik thinks ruefully, he’d be right up there next to Logan trying to outrun him in a sort of metaphorical dick-measuring contest, but now he’s more concerned with making sure that Charles and his shorter legs don’t get left behind.

 _Charles_ , Erik says suddenly in realization, _you’re going to have to say goodbye to Dany_.

 _I know_ , Charles replies quietly, subdued, both arms around the baby dinosaur now as he jogs.

 _Ah_ , Erik says awkwardly, and then does the mental equivalent of stumbling off to check the refrigerator for no discernible reason other than to pretend that he’s busy.

Logan leads them right out of the trees, the ocean very abruptly coming into view as it crashes against the rocky shoreline, and they’ve come to a stop near a cleared patch of land that is a little too rectangular for it to be natural but it takes Erik a few moments to recognize their original landing site from yesterday—it feels like a month ago.  They’re not far from the base at all, now, but it’s a relief when Logan doesn’t suggest running the rest of the way there and instead takes his cigar back out of his pocket, sticks it in his mouth, and then folds his arms and leans against a tree to wait.

“Helicopters already coming back around," he grunts, nodding vaguely in the general direction of Hank's lab, "better get ready to flag 'em down."

"I've got it," Erik says, flexing his power experimentally.  He's never been more excited to get back to civilization in his entire life, and surprisingly the main reason isn't to get the fuck away from all the teeth on this island—he's ready to get back to metal, glorious metal _everywhere_.  It's a little lonely out here in the jungle.

Also the fact that he'll get to fuck Charles into a mattress might have something to do with it as well.

Erik ends up having to only give the lead helicopter a few gentle nudges in their direction, which the pilot fights at first before finally catching sight of them, changing direction willingly and making a beeline towards the makeshift landing site, the other five following suit.  They're military-grade choppers, and Erik isn't sure what that's supposed to mean.  Maybe something _did_ happen.  It takes a matter of seconds for one to land, and when the side door slides open several men jump out, toting large rifles and dressed in full SWAT gear.

"Shit," Logan says, eyebrows raised, before he slouches off to meet them.

"Are you the only remaining civilians on the island?" the first soldier shouts over the sound of the rotor blades, jogging up and looking between Logan and Erik expectantly.

"Uh," Erik explains helpfully.

"Yes," Logan says flatly.

"What about—?" Erik starts.  Deadpound.  Or something.

"It's just us three," Logan says firmly, "unless you ain't picked up the three at the lab yet."

"We've already been to the lab," the soldier confirms, "Dr. McCoy and Mr. Shaw are secure with us.  We have strong reason to evacuate the island.  I suggest you come with us."

"You couldn't stop me from getting in that helicopter if you tried," Erik says dryly.

"What about him?" the solider asks, nodding past Erik.

Erik turns.  Charles lingers by the jungle's edge, crouched down in the dirt and leaves.  As Erik watches he gently sets Dany down, scratching beneath the little Velociraptor's chin with two fingers.

Erik's heart, despite itself, gives a small twinge and he has a small crisis of conscience for a moment.  On one hand, yes, good, get rid of the little varmint, because all it's going to do is get bigger and hungrier and he's pretty much over the whole dinosaur thing at this point; yet on the other hand, Charles is going to be heartbroken after this and a heartbroken Charles, in Erik's mind, equates to something terrifying like a small, baby seal that's lost its mother on the crowded seal beach, barking helpless seal cries that go unanswered.  This is, in fact, very traumatizing to imagine.

"Just a moment," Erik says over his shoulder, before jogging over to Charles.

Charles doesn't look up at his approach, stroking Dany's head gently.  The little Raptor rubs her head against his fingers, and Erik swears that she purrs like a kitten.  She's not cute.  She's _not_.

"Hey," Erik says, stopping beside him.

"Hi," Charles answers, sounding nothing short of absolutely wretched.

Erik holds back a sigh and crouches down beside him, their shoulders knocking together companionably.  He hesitates a moment and then apprehensively sticks his fingers out for Dany to sniff, and she pushes against the pads of his fingertips with her nose.  She clamps her little teeth around his pointer finger, holding it in her mouth without quite biting down, and looks up at him with bright, curious eyes, tail lashing behind her.

"Monster," Erik tells her, and goddamn it he sounds like he's actually going to miss her.  Because he’s not.  At all.

Dany lets out a trill from around his finger, and Charles gives a wet laugh.  "See, she likes you."

Erik carefully tugs his hand away, and Dany immediately goes back to happily nudging against Charles.  "Yeah, but you're Mommy."

Charles snorts dismissively, but he doesn't tear his eyes away from the baby Velociraptor.  "My family owns a lot of land in Westchester, New York.  I'm trying to convince myself to stop imagining Dany running around there."

"Think of all the poor, unsuspecting grizzly bears," Erik says gravely, "you can't just unleash her on them."

“There are no grizzly bears in New York,” Charles scoffs but his shoulders are still slumped, and he's unintentionally projecting a sort of low-level misery that is playing Erik's long-rusted heartstrings like a starving violinist who plays for money on a city street corner.  Erik isn't sure why Charles is so damn attached to the little Raptor, as he's barely had the thing for a day, but then again Erik himself is feeling a little bad about leaving her to fend for herself in a jungle full of dinosaurs the size of semi-trucks or bigger and goddamn it why is he attached to the little terror this is not what he wanted.

"We need to move out!" the SWAT leader shouts at them impatiently and oh yeah, right, they're trying to escape from this place.

As much as escape sounds like all Erik wants for his next eight birthdays, there is no way in earth below and sky above that he's letting them rush Charles, and he's on the verge of deliberately yanking the heavy-duty rifle out of the man's hands to make his point when Charles shakes his head, putting one hand on Erik's arm while with the other he strokes Dany's little head one last time.

"Take care of yourself, little one," he tells her, and then he jerks unsteadily to his feet, swaying a little at the sudden vertigo but brushing off Erik's attempts to steady him, turning on his heel and walking quickly towards the waiting chopper without looking back.

Dany tilts her head inquiringly.  " _Cheep_."

"Hey," Erik tells her, feeling a little stupid for talking to a Velociraptor but oh, what the hell, he basically spilled his heart out to her before so she basically knows everything about him anyway by this point.  "So he's probably going to talk about you every day for the rest of his life and I guess I plan on being there for that—" and then he realizes what he's said and has to take a moment, saying dazedly, "—holy shit, yeah, I plan on being there for that."

Dany trots forward, looking up at him and almost giving the impression that she's actually listening to his second existential crisis of the hour, and lays her head down on his thigh, blinking her wide, reptilian eyes.

Erik gives her a gentle pat on the back.  "So, er, anyway, you'd better take care of yourself because I don't want to be lying when I reassure him for the sixty-five millionth time that you're probably fine, all grown up and ready to eat a mammoth.  Or something."

Dany coos, making her little purring sound again.  Carefully Erik gets her to lift her head so he can stand, pushing himself back up to his feet.  They stare at each other a moment longer, and then Erik gives her an awkward little half-wave before turning to head back towards the chopper.

Except then when he sneaks a backwards glance, he finds Dany tottering after him.  "No," he says firmly, turning around to point at her, "you have to stay.  _Stay_."

Dany lowers her head slightly at his fiercer tone, and Erik unjustly feels like he's just kicked a small fluffy animal, or perhaps just a small scaly Velociraptor baby who seems to think that he and Charles are her parents.  Jesus, he thought he'd never have children.

"Stay," Erik tells her one last time, and then walks back towards the chopper, and this time when he looks back Dany still stands where he told her to, confused and forlorn.

Logan stands outside the helicopter's hatch, watching Erik approach with his arms folded, utterly expressionless.  He has Tyrannosaurus rex blood smeared across his already filthy undershirt.  He and Erik have a long staring contest for the few long moments as Erik approaches, unblinking, and neither of them are by any means a telepath but by the time he draws level with Logan, Erik’s pretty sure that they just had an entire conversation.

"Be right back," Logan says casually, dropping his arms and walking back towards the jungle.

"Sir," the SWAT leader says, stepping in front of him, "it's time to go."

"Yeah, and I gotta piss," Logan says, putting a hand on his shoulder and calmly steering him out of the way, "so unless you want me signing my name all over your chopper, you'll give me one goddamn minute."

Erik rolls his eyes and climbs up into the chopper, ducking low to avoid knocking his head on the hatch.  The inside of the bird is plain and simple, two long benches on either side of the cabin with belts lining the walls to strap in with.  A few more soldiers sit towards the front of the cabin, peering out the tiny, round windows towards the jungle curiously, but Erik's gaze immediately seeks out Charles, sitting towards the back and directly across from none other than Hank and Shaw.

"—not built to fail like that," Hank is explaining, flustered.  He has a large scratch down the side of his face, dried blood coloring his fur purple.  "Someone must have tripped the lock mechanism, but that doesn't make any sense.  You, Logan, and Mr. Lehnsherr were already gone, so Mr. Shaw, our maintenance man, and I were the only ones at the labs and none of _us_ did it."  He pauses.  “Well, unless it really _was_ Toad, but I don’t think so.”

"What happened?" Erik asks, sitting down next to Charles.  Then he scoots close enough as to where they're plastered against each other from shoulder to hip, and then hip down to thigh and knee.  That’s better.

"Apparently the Velociraptor tank was somehow opened last night," Charles says, leaning into him slightly which makes Erik an unreasonable amount of pleased, "so the Raptors got out and attacked Hank and Mr. Shaw after unfortunately, um, eating Mr. Toad.  They had to call these gentlemen of the National Guard for help, since we took the plane."

"Yeah, the plane that went to pieces as soon as we took off?  That plane?" Erik asks, mock-pleasantly while he gives Shaw the nastiest look in his arsenal.  Hank isn't even the subject of its focus and his fur still droops.

Shaw is still wild-eyed, his clothes torn and his perfect hair in chaotic disarray.  "They tried to _eat_ me," he says, gripping the bench so hard his knuckles have gone white.  Erik takes vicious satisfaction out of the fact that he appears to have somehow lost a tooth, and gloats silently about how there will be no more National Best Smile Contest titles in Sebastian's Shaw future until Charles elbows him.

"Generally that's what Velociraptors do," Erik says, mustering up a straight face, "is eat you.  You should've seen the T-rex.  That’s what tried to eat me and Charles.  Probably would've wanted to have you for dessert, too."

"We need to reassess the island for a theme park," Shaw declares, "it's not safe here."

"Have I not been saying that," Erik says flatly, "this whole time."

"Perhaps Velociraptors and Tyrannosaurs rexes were a bit overzealous," Hank agrees, nodding.

“What a concept,” Erik deadpans.

 "Maybe it's better to use this island as a sort of wildlife preserve for studies only."

"And a theme park elsewhere," Shaw says doggedly.

"Well," Hank deliberates, and then they spiral off into a back-and-forth debate that Erik quickly loses track of as he turns his attention back to Charles.

 _Do you think it was Wade?_   Charles wonders, silently so that they don't risk Hank or Shaw overhearing.

 _Who else is insane enough to let contained Velociraptors loose_ , Erik thinks back incredulously.  _He's probably riding off with them into the sunset right now, yelling about how freedom doesn't come free or how every Wednesday should be burrito fiesta night._

It gets Charles to let out a short laugh, his spark of amusement dancing across Erik's brain infectiously so they end up grinning at each other, a little manically but otherwise rebounding amazed relief at how they survived a plane crash and several hungry dinosaur attempts on their lives, and now it's finally over—they're safe, they're going back to the mainland, and they're getting out alive.

 _Unless this helicopter crashes too_ , Charles amends thoughtfully.

 _Don't even think things like that_ , Erik says, a little panicked.

Logan finally rejoins them after taking his damn time, sitting down on the bench several feet away, folding his arms and closing his eyes, presumably to ignore everyone and everything as the SWAT leader jumps in and pulls the hatch closed.  Erik sympathizes heavily with that mindset, or at least he used to before he had a warm telepath pressed up against his side and in his mind, though he can't really say he has anything to complain about regarding that.

The helicopter takes off into the sky, Erik's stomach dropping with the initial upward lift, and soon they're clearing the high canopy tree line.  Charles twists around a little to peer out the window behind them, taking in the view of the island for the last time, while Erik preoccupies himself with making sure that Charles, at least, is strapped in securely as possible.

"At least give me a little breathing room," Charles says wryly after Erik pulls the straps tight with his power, turning back around once the helicopter is out over the open water.

"I'll magnetize you to the wall if I have to," Erik answers, entirely seriously.  They've already been in a plane crash once together, who says it's not going to happen again?

Charles sighs, but it comes with an accompanying wave of fondness as they settle into place, getting comfortable for the flight back, Erik wrapping an arm around Charles’ shoulders.  "Do you think she'll be alright?" he asks in a small voice, barely audible over the chopper's loud drone.  He rests his head on Erik's shoulder, closing his eyes.

"Who, Dany?" Erik asks.  "She's probably already hunted down those poor Stegosaurus and right now is feasting on the flesh of their young."

Charles snorts, sending Erik a half-constructed protest that fades out as he dozes off, all the exhaustion of running for their lives finally catching up with him.  Erik checks one more time that he's securely in place and comfortable but then once he’s satisfied that Charles will be going nowhere as long as he has anything to say about it, he tips his own head back against the comforting metal wall, shutting his eyes for just a minute.  He doesn't exactly mean to fall completely asleep too, intent on staying awake in case something else ridiculous _does_ happen, but he supposes that it's inevitable that he too quickly drifts off. 

It's probably for the best, anyway, because as soon as they reach the mainland again, they have a _lot_ of catching up to do.


	7. Pleistocene

 

X

It takes them awhile after setting back down on safe, solid ground to finally disentangle themselves first from Hank, who apologies so profusely that Charles still isn't sure he believes them even after they say that everything is fine, no harm done, and then Shaw, who wants to talk their ears off about his new and improved plan for the island.  Charles is only half-awake at this point, having slept through the entire flight, so his defense mechanisms are low and Erik has so _helpfully_ abandoned him in favor of actually willingly talking to Logan, of all people, all the way on the other side of the helicopter pad.

"Oh, and there's our ride," Charles says, interrupting Shaw mid-sentence and not-so-subtly concealing his relief when the taxi cab pulls up.  On any other day he would be more than happy to talk about future plans for the island and the dinosaurs inhabiting it because he's already of the firm belief that Hank is right, and it _should_ be turned into a wildlife preserve where the dinosaurs are left alone and can be safely studied in peace, but right now there is nothing he wants more than a long, hot shower and then a large bed.

Originally he'd also wanted to jump Erik's bones, but see if he gets anything now, Charles thinks haughtily, forsaking him to handle Shaw on his own like this.  He thought Erik hated Logan but now they look all buddy-buddy together, shaking hands like they’re best friends or something.

Hmph.

"Why don't you give me a call next week," Charles continues, half-over his shoulder as he makes a beeline for the cab, "because I'd love to discuss this more with you, and by then I can even have a few potential investors lined up who will be interested in helping to keep the island preserved."

"Investors," Shaw says, eyes lighting up at once, zeroing in on the possibility of money in a nanosecond.  "Yes.  Yes, I'll do that."

"Wonderful," Charles says, and then he climbs into the back of the cab and slams the door shut.

Erik joins him a few moments later, yanking the other door open with his power and climbing in, fumbling a little with the bundled-up shirt he's holding awkwardly with both hands.  He leans forward to give the driver instructions to the hotel he'd been staying at before the ride out to Shaw’s island and then collapses back against the seat as the cab begins to pull away, letting out a long sigh.

"Alright," he says eventually into the silence, seemingly unaware of Charles' irritation as he shifts sideways on the seat to face Charles.  Charles merely raises an eyebrow at him, but Erik seems slightly nervous as he holds out the bundle in his hands.  "So I hope you were serious about your family owning that land in New York, because I, er, sort of—"

He doesn't even get to finish his sentence before the bundle starts to wiggle, and Dany pokes her head out of the folds of the fabric with a curious _chirp_.

Charles' eyes widen and he's dimly aware that he's probably gaping like a fish as he automatically reaches for her, sparing half a moment to cloak the cab driver's awareness from what exactly is going on in the backseat, and then he has a lap full of happily wriggling baby Velociraptor.

“How did you—?” Charles starts to ask weakly, but then he’s laughing as Dany struggles the rest of the way out of her wrappings, trilling happily as she butts her head against his chest, little claws scrabbling for purchase as the cab takes a sharp turn.

Charles lifts her up to keep her from falling over completely and his heart just about melts when she reaches up to touch noses with him with another happy trill.

“Logan stuffed her in his pocket,” Erik explains, watching them, “he’s got those, ah, cargo pants, so she fit perfectly.”  He replays his memory of a rather intense stare-down he and Logan had shared prior to leaving the island, adding, _I helped, it was my idea_.

“Why didn’t you tell me on the helicopter?” Charles demands, hugging Dany tightly to his chest where she curls up immediately, purring.  She bites down onto his shirt, holding the fabric tightly in her teeth as if to prove that she’s not letting him get away so easily this time.

“Surprise,” Erik says smugly, radiating self-satisfaction so strongly that Charles snorts, rolling his eyes, before reaching over to fist a hand in Erik’s shirt and pulling him over for a kiss.

Trapped between them while they indulge in a kiss entirely inappropriate for the backseat of a taxi cab, Dany squeaks and squirms, snapping her teeth in annoyance as Erik accidentally crushes her a little when he leans forward to deepen the kiss after Charles parts his lips to grant him fuller access.

Charles is flushed and panting several moments later when they finally pull apart, and never in his life has he ever been this glad for his ability to keep people like taxi drivers from noticing things they don’t want to know about anyway.  Dany wiggles her way out of Charles’ grasp, tail lashing as she slips down onto the seat, chattering.

“Hotel,” Erik says, heavy with promise as Charles nods, and then he looks down in surprise as Dany leaps over to settle in his lap with one last _cheep_.

Charles grins so hard that his face starts to hurt.  “See?  I _told_ you she likes you.”

“Charles,” Erik says very seriously, “I have had a vast number of opportunities over the past two days to say ‘I told you so’ but I refrained.”  At Charles’ skeptical look, he shrugs and adds, “Mostly.”  He absently pets Dany, stroking her scaly back, a simple enough gesture, but it shows how far Erik's come in accepting Dany and he even had Logan smuggle her off the island just for Charles and Charles feels like he might _burst_.

So, because he has the driver's attention successfully diverted and he's feeling more than a little turned on, Charles leans over and purrs into Erik's ear, "You'd better be ready to fuck me into next century, because that's how I want to feel once you're done with me."

"Charles," Erik hisses, jerking as Charles runs a hand slowly up his thigh, "we're in a—"

"No one's going to see," Charles says, reaching down past Dany to the junction of Erik's legs, where it's already warm with budding arousal, "I've got us covered, and nothing you could do here would break my concentration."  He's said the magic words—Erik is rock hard beneath his hand, which Charles rubs up and down appreciatively.  Charles is by no means a paleontologist, but he believes he can safely assume that he’s just discovered the largest bone on the planet.  "Oh, you're _big_."

Erik lets out a strangled groan that turns into a ragged growl that goes straight down to Charles' cock.  He dumps Dany down onto the dirty floor of the cab, ignoring her indignant squawk, and then grabs Charles with both hands and hauls him roughly across the seat and manhandles him so that Charles straddles Erik's lap, his knees digging into the back of the seat on either side of Erik's hips.

"Nothing, then?" Erik says, pupils already blown wide with lust as he looks up at Charles, their regular height difference offset by their positions.  Charles can already feel his heart rate picking up.

"That wasn't an—offer for a—challenge," he gasps out as Erik attacks his throat, and even so he tilts his head back to grant Erik better access as Erik places sloppy open-mouthed kisses against his skin.  Charles closes his eyes, lightly batting away the attentions of the people in the two cars passing their taxi on either side, and then lets out a whimper when Erik applies his teeth, nipping at him before sucking hard enough to leave a mark.  "God, Erik," Charles says, his voice wrecked already even to his own ears, "you have more teeth than that Tyrannosaurs."

"The plan _is_ to devour you," Erik murmurs slyly, making Charles shiver.  He can feel Erik's cock bulging upwards against the seam of his pants, a hot, hard mound directly between Charles' own splayed-out legs so Charles rocks forward, grinding their crotches together so that they both moan, a spark of arousal jumping back and forth between them like a current on a live wire, amplified by Charles' telepathy as he nearly loses himself in the tantalizing feedback loop between them.

The driver's head starts to turn, but Charles catches himself at the last second, pushing the man's attention back to the road with the same kind of desperation a baseball player has when sliding across the home plate.

"Nice save," Erik tells him, but he's wearing a razor-sharp smirk and Charles has to physically stop himself from diving all the way into Erik's mind to see what he has planned next.

"I'm an expert, darling," he says instead, rocking his hips forward again and hissing at the slow burn of indirect contact, "do try harder."

Erik’s grin only widens, which makes Charles reassess his original theory—forget Tyrannosaurus rex, Erik has more teeth than Megalodon.  His hands, originally settled on Charles’ hips, slowly slide upwards, one moving to press against Charles’ back, pushing Charles closer to himself, while the other he lifts all the way to Charles’ lips.

Coyly, Charles takes the offered finger into his mouth, staring directly into Erik’s eyes as he laves his tongue against Erik’s skin, making what he knows is a perfect red ring around the digit with his lips.  Erik’s eyes are half-lidded as he watches Charles fellate his finger, and Charles groans when he feels the button of his trousers undo itself and then his zipper slowly starting to slide down centimeter by centimeter.

_You can’t possibly mean to—_

“Better keep the driver’s attention away,” Erik murmurs, and then he slides his finger out of Charles’ mouth, pulling it free from Charles’ lips with a wet pop.

Charles arches forward as Erik slips the hand with his slick, spit-covered finger down his back, bypassing his other hand and sliding down the back of Charles’ trousers and underneath the elastic band of his pants.  He moans when Erik’s fingers ghost across his ass, and then jerks forward when he feels the press of a finger against his hole, the tip of Erik’s finger pushing into him for just a moment before withdrawing to trace a tantalizing circle around his entrance.

“Oh god,” Charles whimpers, his cock jutting up against his pants and out of his open fly, “ _Erik_ —”

“Concentrate, Charles,” Erik answers, rolling Charles’ name in that glorious accent, thicker now with arousal.  He traces another maddening circle before pushing his finger gently back in, slow and mindful of the fact that spit has nothing on lube when it comes to slick wetness.

Charles’ hips jerk again of their own volition, inadvertently—or perhaps very purposefully—pushing himself further down on Erik’s long, slender finger.  It burns, the drag of skin-on-skin almost too much with only spit to ease the way, but Charles finds that he likes it, leaning forward to mash his lips against Erik’s as the metallokinetic begins to move his finger back and forth, pressing in deeper and deeper.

 _So tight_ , Erik’s thoughts say, riding a tidal wave of lust that leaves Charles gasping into his mouth, _so hot, so tight—_

Charles’ answer is completely unintelligible as he fucks himself on Erik’s finger, his _single finger_ , eyes nearly rolling back into his head as he imagines what two or three or Erik’s cock will feel like, pushing into him and splitting him open wide.  He feels extremely exposed, splayed out on Erik’s lap with his knees squeezing Erik’s bony hips tightly as he rocks back and forth, the top of his head brushing against the roof of the cab.  He fumbles with the driver’s mind, struggling to keep the man distracted from all the sounds coming from the backseat as they unabashedly continue their spontaneous tryst, most of his own attention snagging on how he’s so hard that it almost hurts, the front of his pants thoroughly soaked.

“I’m going to fuck you,” Erik growls, pressing his finger up against Charles’ prostate mercilessly, “I’m going to fuck you until you scream, you’ve been driving me mad since I first saw you—”

Charles moans, shuddering, mentally scrambling to keep himself from coming because it’s too soon, much too soon, but Erik’s voice is doing things to him, as well as his finger, which is both too much and not enough, not nearly enough—

Erik withdraws his finger, sliding it out of Charles’ ass slowly and returning to drawing circles around his clenching hole, his other hand running up and down Charles’ back soothingly.  “Not yet, sweetheart,” he whispers against Charles’ lips, giving him a soft kiss, “we’re almost there.”

It takes Charles a few dizzying moments to realize that Erik means they’re almost at the hotel and not millimeters away from tipping over the edge and coming in the backseat of a taxi, which he’s sure later in retrospect he’d severely regret but presently can only manage a wave of impatience that makes Erik chuckle as he pulls his hand out of Charles’ pants entirely.

“No one saw,” Charles feels the need to point out, a tad more snottily than he’d originally meant for that to come out, but who can really blame him at this point with the levels of frustration that he’s currently experiencing as Erik deftly zips his pants up and buttons his trousers closed again.

“Miraculously,” Erik replies, entirely too smug for Charles’ liking.  He helps Charles maneuver back onto the seat beside him, just as the cab pulls up outside their hotel destination.  “I’m assuming that you can handle things regarding Dany?”

Much to Charles’ chagrin, he’d nearly forgotten about the baby Velociraptor entirely what with the activities he and Erik have just gotten up to.  “Child’s play,” he says breezily, willing himself into a semblance of calm—which mostly involves mentally placating his raging boner—and ducking down to search for the little Raptor.  She’s crawled under the front passenger seat of the car, enthusiastically gnawing on a strip of fabric she’s torn off the bottom of the seat, and Charles has to gently coax her to let go so he can scoop her up into his arms again as Erik opens the car door.

Between the two of them they manage to scrounge up enough cash to pay for the ride along with a hefty tip, which makes Charles feel slightly better about all the selfish mind-whammying he’d done to the poor man.  They hurry into the lobby of the hotel, Charles following Erik as he heads directly for the lift and casting his telepathy out like a net around him, locking on to anyone whose attention snags on them, no matter how briefly, and changing their perceptions of Dany from a small lizard to a Chihuahua.  Close enough.

Erik hits the button and fortunately the doors open right away, ready and waiting, and when the doors close again they’re all alone in the small box that begins to ascend as soon as Erik presses the button for the fifth floor.  Erik backs Charles into the nearest corner, boxing him in before leaning down to kiss him absolutely filthily, all tongue and teeth, and Charles nearly drops Dany when Erik slips a hand down between them to squeeze Charles’ crotch.

“You’re going to kill me,” Charles says in a ragged whisper, leaning back limply against the wall of the lift, legs spread wide to accommodate Erik as he presses closer.

Dany _chirps_ , possibly to remind them that she’s still actually there and to keep Erik from crushing her against Charles’ chest again.  Charles laughs, lifting her up in the limited remaining space so that they can touch noses again, leaking his happiness about _everything_ to Erik, who smiles in response.

“You have a lovely smile,” Charles tells him honestly, all joking about the amount of teeth he possesses aside.  Dany _cheeps_ in what must be agreement, so Charles lifts her up a little higher so she can press her nose against Erik’s as well in what he’s beginning to think of as a Velociraptor kiss.

“No I don’t,” Erik mutters, but he’s flushing slightly and Charles has to laugh—after all what they did in the taxi, _this_ is what makes Erik blush.  It is almost unfairly endearing.

The lift gives a quiet _ding_ and the doors slide open, revealing a long, plain hallway that is thankfully empty of human life, and Charles accepts Erik’s offered hand and allows himself to be led out of the lift and down the hall, passing several doors until they come to a stop outside the room belonging to Erik.  Erik’s mind goes sharp with focus, honing in on the locking mechanism of the door, and a moment later the electronic tumblers are turning and the little light on the lock flashes green.

Erik pushes the handle down and opens the door with his powers, ushering Charles inside past the cool blast of air conditioning, flicking on lights as they go.  It’s a standard room with two full-sized beds, one which has what must be Erik’s suitcase propped open, undisturbed despite the fact that the hotel’s cleaning service has been through to remake the other bed.

“I’m going to put Dany down,” Charles announces through the sudden palpable tension, stepping sideways into the bathroom and almost stumbling over the raised ledge of the doorframe.  Smooth, Xavier, extremely smooth.

The bathroom is a typical affair as well, stocked with towels and little sampler bottles of shampoo which Charles may or may not have a tendency to steal anytime he sets foot remotely near a hotel room bathroom, but for now they go unmolested as he casts a scrutinizing look across the tub before deeming it worthy enough to set Dany down inside it, making sure the tap is turned firmly off.  She raps against the porcelain curiously with her claws, trilling softly as she hops around with several loud _thunks_.

“Shh,” Charles shushes her with a laugh, kneeling down beside the tub and reaching to pet her, “we’ll be back, er—eventually.  Be good.”

Dany picks her way back over to him with a soft _squeak_ , rubbing her head against his fingers.

Charles feels Erik enter the bathroom, the proximity of his mind drawing closer a strong hint but then all he can focus on is Erik’s physical presence looming behind him, crowding the small room.  He leans down over Charles, resting one hand on the edge of the tub while the other joins Charles’ in giving Dany a few light scratches beneath the chin.

“Is the little monster going to behave?” Erik asks silkily, and the way his mouth is right beside Charles’ ear makes Charles shiver.

“She’ll be fine,” he manages to reply before Erik gives a low chuckle and grasps him by the shoulders, pulling him up to his feet and turning him around so that they’re facing each other.  “What are you—”

He yelps when without warning Erik ducks down to get his shoulder level with Charles’ stomach, hoisting him up by throwing Charles over his shoulder, coming dangerously close to knocking his head against the counter.  Living on the edge, and all that.

“Erik!” Charles coughs where he dangles helplessly, face-to-face with Erik’s pert, denim-clad ass which actually isn’t an entirely bad thing, come to think of it.  “ _Neanderthal_.”

“Just going along with the whole prehistoric theme,” Erik replies lightly, leaving Dany behind and walking out of the bathroom, pulling the door shut with his powers and ominous finality, “and this is the part where I drag you off to my cave to finally have my way with you.”

“Roughly 65 million years passed after the dinosaurs died out before people appeared on Earth,” Charles says as snootily as he can manage, apropos of nothing while hanging limply and completely at Erik’s mercy.

Erik snorts as he tosses Charles down onto the bed not occupied by his suitcase, where he’s evidently stripped off the comforter and pulled back the sheets to clear the way.  Charles can’t help the laugh that escapes him when he hits the mattress on his back and bounces once or twice, kicking off his shoes and scooting backwards up the bed to make room for Erik as the metallokinetic crawls up after him, eyes glinting with amusement.

Charles stops when his head hits a pillow and then he pulls Erik down on top of himself and into a kiss, sucking on Erik’s tongue with a contented sigh as his hands slide down Erik’s back to find the hem of Erik’s shirt, pulling it up and over Erik’s head.  They part for a brief moment only so Erik can yank his shirt off the rest of the way and toss it across the room, heedless of where it lands, and then they’re right back to kissing as Erik’s clever fingers get to work on the buttons of Charles’ shirt, brushing little touches here and there across his chest and stomach.

 _Hurry up_ , Charles commands as they fumble together to remove the rest of their clothing, and then he moans as Erik slides a knee up between his legs, applying the _just right_ amount of pressure for Charles to rock up against while Erik hastily disposes of their pants.

“As you wish, Khaleesi,” Erik says dryly, taking Charles’ leaking cock in one perfectly callused hand and stroking him, dragging his hand up and down the shaft.  After a few strokes he twists his hand so he can thumb Charles’ slit at the same time, rubbing back and forth mercilessly.

Charles feels his balls instantly tighten as he throws his head back with a strangled moan, and it’s too much already, especially after how Erik had fingered him in his lap in the car, so Charles ends up fisting his hands in the sheets and coming straight into Erik’s hand, legs falling open wider helplessly.  Erik hums appreciatively, his mind flashing through several images of how pleasing Charles is to look at currently, before shifting his other leg so that he kneels between Charles’ legs, splaying out one hand wide across Charles’ belly and leaning down to lap at his sensitive, spent cock.

“Oh _god_ ,” Charles whimpers as he feels Erik swallow him down, the warm, wet suction of Erik’s mouth pulling on his cock so soon after orgasm, his hips twitching feebly.  He can already feel his cock stirring again in interest, twitching in Erik’s mouth as Erik pushes his tongue against his slit, just like he had with his thumb.  “You—I—”

“Easy, sweetheart,” Erik murmurs after he pulls off of Charles’ cock with a wet slurp.  He doesn’t go far, and instead leans back in to lick another searing stripe down to the base and mouths at Charles’ balls, laving his tongue across them again and again until Charles thinks he might cry out of sheer frustration.

“ _Erik_ ,” he pleads, his cock turgid against his belly already again, leaving a small smear of precome across his skin as he squirms restlessly, “fuck me, _fuck_ me—”

Erik growls, sitting up abruptly and grabbing the tin of lube that sits on the bedside table along with a condom packet, tossing both onto the bed.  “You going to open up for me?” he says, the words accompanied by a wave of intent so potent that Charles shudders.  Erik unscrews the lid with his powers and dips two fingers into the slick, reaching down to trace Charles’ hole.

“ _Hngh_ ,” Charles gets out when Erik’s first finger breaches him, gliding in with the help of the lube.  His hands clench in the sheets again as Erik adds the second finger, stretching him carefully but not by any means slowly, scissoring his fingers back and forth inside Charles, rubbing against his inner walls and getting him nice and wet.

“So tight, Charles,” Erik groans, pushing the pads of his fingers against Charles’ prostate again, the angle much better this time.  “Still so tight for me, I’m going to fill you up—”

Charles thrusts his hips up with a choked sob, pushing Erik’s fingers deeper into his ass.  “I want you inside me,” he pants out, desperate with the hot curl of unbearable arousal in his stomach that leaves him feeling strung-out and on the edge, “Erik, now, I want you _now_.”

Erik pulls his fingers out with another groan, fumbling shakily with the foil of the condom packet before ripping it open at last with his teeth.  Charles tilts his head down to watch Erik roll the rubber onto his long, thick cock, rock hard and leaking, and oh, that’s right, Charles thinks dizzily as Erik smears more lube onto himself, Erik hasn’t come yet.  Then Erik is rolling forward over him, hiking Charles’ legs up to fold him carefully in half before leaning down to pin Charles’ hands on either side of his head against the mattress.  They moan in unison as the tip of Erik’s cock presses against Charles’ slick and waiting hole, catching against the edge and slipping into alignment.

Charles gasps at the blunt pressure as Erik pushes in, stretching him wider than even Erik’s fingers had as Erik sinks down into him, trembling with the effort of taking it slow.  Charles locks his ankles together behind Erik’s back, arching up into Erik as best as he can while pinned down like he is, opening a direct link between their minds and flooding them both with the sensation of pushing into tight heat and being filled completely at the same time.

Erik’s breath stutters, and his hips give a small thrust, making them both gasp as his cock slides in deeper with the motion.  “You’re going to be the death of me,” he grits out, leaning forward until he’s bottoming out inside Charles, his balls flush against Charles’ ass.

“Darling,” Charles replies, his voice strained on the account that his ass is full of cock and it’s never felt more glorious, “extinction was never an option.”

“No,” Erik murmurs, pulling back out for a moment only to thrust back in sharply and make Charles’ breath hitch, “it’s just inevitable.”

“We have time,” Charles whispers as Erik starts to move more fluidly, setting up a rhythm of fucking in and out of Charles, “we have all the time in the—oh god, there, right _there_ —”

“How long till the sun dies?” Erik asks him, snapping his hips forward as directed and hitting Charles’ prostate at just the right angle to send shockwaves of pleasure up Charles’ spine.

“Approximately—oh, _Erik_ —four to five billion years,” Charles gasps, using what little leverage he has to push back against Erik’s cock until he can nearly feel it in his throat, “so barring any—a-asteroids or the like—we have plenty—of time, god, _Erik_ —”

“Keep saying my name,” Erik breathes, pistoning his hips relentlessly and fucking into Charles just as he’d promised, hard and fast and barely giving Charles time to draw breath.  Erik fucks like a machine, well-oiled and all flawless German engineering, probably backed by some outrageous kind of lifetime warranty that is guaranteed to leave Charles satisfied for the rest of his life, and he spares a moment’s thought for fervent appreciation for the fact that, however many millions of years ago, Erik’s first ancestor crawled up out of the primordial soup of life and made his evolution possible.

Charles obeys Erik’s order, chanting Erik’s name in time with every thrust until he starts to lose coherency, mindless babble pouring from his lips as Erik’s thrusts change from short and shallow and fast to long and deep and slow, the drag of Erik’s cock against the inner walls of his ass along with the continuous outpour of filthy curses and gentle promises alike from Erik’s mind driving Charles straight over the edge into the blissed-out white of orgasm, coming for a second time with a loud cry, his untouched cock spurting white stickiness across his own belly and Erik’s chest.

Erik grows erratic as he fucks Charles through his orgasm, teetering on the edge but not quite there yet, panting as his entire frame over Charles grows tense with impending release.  Charles can only lie there and take it, locked in place by Erik’s hold and whimpering in the aftershocks as he comes back down from his own high, reaching out shakily with his mind to touch on Erik’s.

 _Come for me, darling_ , he says, and that’s all it takes for Erik to slam his hips forward one last time and bury himself deeply in Charles, shaking apart with a low groan.  Charles sighs, going limp beneath him as he feels Erik’s hot come filling the condom, and Erik collapses forward to rest his forehead against Charles’ shoulder.

They’re silent for a few moments, chests heaving as they catch their breaths, before Erik slowly sits back up and carefully pulls out, gently unfolding Charles and helping him stretch out on the bed again.  Charles slowly reels his mind back in from where he’d nearly exploded outward and lit up every mind with voracious lust in the hotel and the ten city blocks in its vicinity, only dimly aware of Erik rising from the bed to dispose of the condom, disappearing into the bathroom.

“She’s fine,” Erik answers Charles’ silent query when he reemerges shortly after, bearing a damp washcloth that he tosses in Charles’ direction.  “Curled up and sleeping, actually.”

Charles groans when it lands on his chest with a soft, wet _slap._   He doesn’t move at first.  His bones feel like they’ve turned into liquid.  Perhaps tar.  They can mine him as a fossil fuel in a few million years.  When he does move, shifting his legs slightly and lifting one arm to wipe the cloth across himself, his muscles give a twinge that is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, per say, and more of a polite reminder that he’s well out of practice for this sort of thing but his body is heartily agreeing that it could go for more.

Eventually.  When he’s not feeling like a puddle of goo, because after all Erik did just make him come _twice_.

“I’m a dino- _sore_ ,” he announces to the room at large, which earns him one of Erik’s signature Looks as he crawls back up onto the bed and collapses facedown beside Charles.

“You couldn’t have held off on that one,” he mutters, “and taken the higher road?”  His thoughts, however, are tinged with fond amusement, and Charles feels rather like a sunflower turning its face towards the sun for light and warmth as he greedily soaks in Erik’s regard.

“Of course not,” Charles replies in his best no-nonsense voice.  He tosses the washcloth haphazardly across the room for housekeeping to deal with later and then shifts onto his side, cuddling up to Erik with contented happiness, letting out another burst of it when Erik lifts one arm and wraps it around him to drag him even closer, and marveling in the fact that he’s somehow wormed his way past Erik’s prickly exterior.

He supposes that there’s nothing like surviving the hardships of nearly being eaten three—or four, depending on how you look at it—times by various species of dinosaurs to bring people together.  They’ve even sort of adopted a _child_ together.  Oh god.

Erik makes a muffled sound into his pillow, giving Charles a small squeeze _.  I can feel you thinking from here_ , he thinks purposefully, _stop it._

 _A telepath never stops thinking,_ Charles replies matter-of-factly, but he burrows down into Erik’s side anyway, taking refuge in his sleepy calm.  They’re both utterly disgusting, from spending two on the island and then now the sex, but a nap sounds good right now.  They can figure out all the rest later.

 _Exactly_ , Erik agrees, giving off the mental impression of a yawn even while he projects silent satisfaction at the way Charles curls their minds together, _because like you said, we’ve got time._

 _Yes_ , Charles answers, imagining for a moment how many more times they’ll go around the Sun on their cosmic ride through the Universe, _all the time in the world._


	8. Epilogue - Holocene

Erik Lehnsherr’s likes, in no particular order, are as follows: his mutant ability, his mother, driving fast and furiously, and strawberry ice cream with chocolate chips.

His dislikes, in no particular order, are: everything else.

He’s working on this, though.  He’s learning to broaden his horizons a little.  For example, he likes standing in the kitchen next to the marble top counter during the quiet, early morning, the only sound being the distinct gurgle of a very expensive coffee machine as it goes about brewing him very expensive coffee.  And, because believe it or not he’s the World’s Best Boyfriend, he’s also learned to like putting on a kettle to boil at the same time.

He’s also learned to like this huge house, even though initially it’d been a little startling to discover that “my family owns a lot of land in Westchester, New York” actually means “I own a few hundred acres and also a large mansion in Westchester, New York, and that’s not even getting into the matter of my trust fund.”  He’d gotten over it—or over himself, depending on who you ask—and now he finds it’s rather nice to have this much space.

Except when three-foot tall Velociraptors jump up on top of the counter behind you in Stalking Mode so when you turn around halfway through a yawn you’re unexpectedly face-to-face with a snout full of razor-sharp teeth.

“Get _down_ ,” Erik snaps, distinctly Not Amused, whereas Dany opens her jaws and lets out what can only be the Velociraptor version of Evil Laughter of Doom before she obediently hops down off the counter.  On the floor, her head is nearly level with Erik’s waist.  “We should just lock you in a cage until we feel like letting you out,” Erik mutters, pulling open the fridge to rummage around in the bottom drawer.

Dany whistles, a loud, shrill sound that she’d taught herself a couple months ago and now employs it whenever she’s extremely excited about something, which is namely food.

Monster.

Erik rips open a packet of bacon and tosses a few slices over his shoulder in quick succession without looking.  He hears jaws snap shut but otherwise no telltale splat of meat hitting the ground as he shoves the drawer closed again and shuts the fridge.

When he turns around again Dany is watching him keenly, licking her chops.

“You’re going to get fat,” Erik tells her, and then pointedly walks past her to see about pouring himself a cup of that coffee.

He likes black coffee.

While he’s pouring himself the perfect, rightful amount into his cup—which has a large T-rex on the side because _someone_ thinks he’s really funny—the kettle on the stove begins to whistle, which always makes Dany growl until he tells her to knock it off.

“Knock it off,” he says absently, and it takes only a small sliver of his concentration to lift the kettle off the heat with his power and pour it into the cup he already has waiting.  Two spoonfuls of sugar along with a dash of milk follow after the tea has had a few moments to begin to steep, and he’s been told that he always frowns just a little when he concentrates to make the spoon stir everything in but whatever, he also frowns at utility bills and small children, so it’s just a part of who he is.

Dany’s talons click on the tile floor as she sidles up next to him, pushing her nose against his thigh.  Erik reaches down to pat her and alright, _fine_ , if he really has to admit it he likes Dany too.

“Come on,” he tells her after he’s collected his cup and the dainty little cup of tea complete with a dainty little saucer, “time for a wake up call.”

Dany shoots out of the kitchen like a well-aimed missile, thundering down the hall in a blur of scales and feathers.  At this rate, Erik thinks wryly as he follows at a much more sedate pace, she’ll be fit for the Kentucky Derby.  Wade can be their jockey.  Erik would bet every last single penny of the trust fund on them because they would definitely win out of sheer ridiculousness, even while hawking free chimichangas to the crowd at the same time.

She pauses to wait for him at the foot of the stairs, craning her neck back and chirping at him impatiently but otherwise remains quivering in place until he draws level with her.

“Aaaand,” he says, dragging the word out for a few extended seconds, “go.”  He smirks when she rockets up the stairs to the second floor.  She’s going to be thrilled when they fly back out to the International Dinosaur Preserve next week.  The grounds of the Xavier land that they’ve let her run wild on are expansive and give her plenty of room, but Erik suspects that there’s just something about that godforsaken jungle that really unleashes the beast, for lack of better term.

Even though Erik knows for a fact that she’s already killed at least one black bear out in the woods on the edge of the Xavier property, because he’d stumbled across what little remained one morning while out on a run.  Needless to say, Velociraptors are extremely messy eaters and have little to no regard for very much of anything else once the bloodlust sets in.  Dany had seemed inordinately pleased with herself for the entire following week, leaving Erik to struggle not to be unreasonably proud of his little hunter.

They try to get out to the island at least once or twice a month, not only for Dany’s sake but to also make sure that the dinosaurs are being studied through nonintrusive methods and that all research is going smoothly.  Hank has elected to stay on the island full time, which Erik likens to Frankenstein’s creator sticking around to watch his monsters grow, which is only a little bit creepy when he stops to actually think about it.  Currently Hank is leading a team of scientists who are there to study the mating habits of Triceratops.  Erik’s not sure why they didn’t just ask him, because he could tell them basically everything they need to know in vivid detail.  Their loss.

Fortunately after a long month of pointless deliberation—pointless because Erik could have described with perfect accuracy how he would ultimately decide—Shaw has basically turned over the reins of the island entirely, much more concerned with getting his theme park of animatronic dinosaurs up and running.  His announcement about his retirement from “the wonderful world of dinosaur science,” effective immediately, had been three pages long.  Erik thinks he’s just holding a grudge for the tooth he lost.

Erik actually doesn’t mind the island half as much when he gets to carry a large tranquilizer gun at all times, with plenty of extra tranquilizers that all have enough power to drop an elephant.  Or a Tyrannosaurus rex.  _Some_ people like to argue that it’s completely unnecessary for him to carry a weapon at all, as they all make sure to avoid the Tyrannosaurus territory for now until methods that are actually safe are developed to study them, while all the Velociraptors are, and he quotes, _Wade’s homedawgs_.

Erik doesn’t care.  He’s with Logan on this one—constant vigilance.

Dany is hunkered down and pressed flat to the floor like some kind of Velociraptor rug when Erik reaches the top of the stairs, tail sticking straight out behind her.  He’ll never quite understand Raptor behavior.  At least they’re out of the teething stage.  That had been an absolute nightmare, and Erik’s pretty sure that the dining room table is never going to be the same.

Erik steps up beside her.  Dany quivers.  They exchange a look of Nefarious Intent.  Then Erik reaches down the hallway with his powers and slowly turns the doorknob of the last door on the right as soundlessly as possible.

“Three,” he murmurs, pushing the door open a fraction, “two,” a little bit further, “one,” all the way open now, “ _go_.”

Dany launches herself forward, unleashing her coiled muscles and bounding down the hallway in a series of long bounces like some kind of hellish kangaroo, and when she reaches the doorway she lets out a loud, gleeful _hiss_ as she leaps out of Erik’s view.

Erik casually catches up, taking his time on the account of the two cups he’s balancing, but when he eventually reaches the doorway to the bedroom he stops for a moment to take in the view because he likes to look in and watch.

Dany’s invited herself up on top of the large, comfy bed, snuffling around in the piled duvet that, as Erik watches, starts to fight back a little by shoving weakly at her nose with a soft groan.  Erik grins.  He hopes Dany is standing on something important, like a leg.  Or a stomach.  Possibly ribs.

 _Call her off, call her off_ , comes a sleepily disgruntled voice, tripping into Erik’s mind and Erik gets the impression of a cat haughtily walking across whatever book you’re trying to read and then curling up right on top of it in a very literal _pay attention to me and do as I say_.

“It’s about time someone woke you up,” Erik says aloud, walking around the side of the bed to set his coffee cup down on the nightstand.  He edges sideways onto the bed from there carefully, nudging Dany out of his way with his foot so he can settle himself comfortably into place against the headboard, right back in the spot he’d vacated previously.  “She’s _your_ kid.”

A snort emits from beneath the blankets.  “Are we going to ignore your behavior the last time we ran into Wade’s pack and Dany took an interest in one of the young males?”

“She’s too young to be dating,” Erik says promptly, and then grabs a fistful of duvet and pulls it off the lump in the center of the bed.

Charles is curled into his pillow, and he cracks one eye open balefully at Erik as soon as the morning light hits his face.  Dany moves in for the kill immediately, hopping over to nuzzle at him until he loses the Grumpy Cat face and is laughing, squirming beneath her helplessly in a vain attempt to push her away.  Undeterred, Dany _cheeps_ at him happily, continuing her attack until Erik finally takes pity on him and helps wrestle her away.

Charles pushes himself up into a sitting position, and he looks so perfectly sleep-rumpled with his hair sticking up at every odd angle imaginable and his obnoxiously blue eyes still a little hazy even as he smiles one of his megawatt smiles that could potentially reverse universal entropy, and Erik is overtaken by a wave of almost irritating fondness—or rather it _would_ be irritating if it didn’t involve Charles.

Erik knows he’s busted when he feels the flickering warmth in the back of his mind that tells him Charles has overheard his thoughts and is having Feelings about it, so to distract them both he leans in and drops a kiss right on Charles’ freckled nose.

“Really?” he asks reflexively, watching the blush spread out across Charles’ cheeks.  “Last night you lacked all shame when it came to getting down on your knees and—”

“Tea,” Charles interrupts him firmly, and Erik sighs but obliges, handing the cup and saucer over.  Charles takes a large gulp, somehow not scalding his entire esophagus.  “Perfect.”

“Of course it is,” Erik answers, mildly affronted that there could even be a possibility that his tea _isn’t_ spot-on perfect, “I make it the same way every single morning.”

“Only one of the many reasons I love you,” Charles assures him fondly, patting his hand.

Erik snorts and pretends that he doesn’t want to rub up against Charles like a cat.

Or a friendly Velociraptor, and speaking of which theirs is currently attempting to defy gravity by hopping from the bed onto Charles’ nightstand, which is an old rickety thing that probably dates back to the eighteen hundreds and therefore is nowhere close to being durable enough to withstand the mighty Daenerys Xavier-Lehnsherr.  It topples over immediately, sending Dany and the stack of the _Lord of the Rings_ trilogy extended-cut DVDs that live there constantly sprawling across the floor.  Erik’s learned to like those too, but if he’s honest his favorite part is not the movies themselves but rather how he gets to hold—not _cuddle_ , he refuses to say _cuddle_ —Charles and watch him mouth every single line.

It’s endearing.  And also the sword fights aren’t so bad either.

“Dany!” Charles calls in concern, shifting to peer down over the edge of the bed.  “You know better than to jump on the furniture!”

Dany squirms dramatically on the carpet for a few moments, tail thrashing, before she gets back up to her feet, tilting her head and _chirping_.

Erik rolls his eyes.  “You weren’t cute when you were a hatchling,” he blatantly lies, “and you aren’t cute now.”

Somehow she’s mastered the ability to do Bambi Eyes, which she employs now and is a lethal weapon in its own right.  Erik swears up and down that Charles taught her on purpose, because she certainly didn’t learn them from _him_ , while for some reason Charles maintains that he has no idea what Erik’s talking about which is a filthy lie.

“Aw, darling, you just have to be careful,” Charles tells her while Erik rights the nightstand with a flick of his powers, “and of course you’re cute.  And actually, Erik, speaking of cute—”

“What?” Erik asks, bracing himself for an allergic reaction.

“I’ve been thinking,” Charles starts and oh no, nothing good ever follows the words _I’ve been thinking_ out of Charles Xavier’s mouth, despite how much brainpower is at his disposal to do said thinking.

“No,” Erik says immediately.  He’s putting his foot down.  Drawing the line.  In the sand.

“You haven’t even heard what I’m going to say yet,” Charles says, faintly exasperated and looking more and more like the wave rushing towards the shore to wash Erik’s measly line away, “just hear me out.  I’ve been talking to Hank, and I think I want to start a dinosaur nursery.”

“Dinosaur,” Erik says, “nursery.”

“No more Velociraptors,” Charles assures him quickly, smiling fondly at Dany as she hops back up onto the bed, “we have our one and only right here.  Well, unless unforeseen circumstances arise.  But anyway, I’d like to take in any dinosaur hatchlings that need a home.  Like right now, for example, Hank’s got a newborn Stegosaurus that was sort of the runt of its brood, and so—”

 _Charles_ , Erik stops him mentally, not without a certain measure of fondness as he watches the telepath get all bright-eyed and excited about rescuing overgrown baby lizards.  _It’s fine.  We’ll do it._   And if he’s still a little unsure about it now, that won’t matter for long.  He’ll learn to like it.  That’s inevitable, anyway, if it has to do with Charles.

Charles smiles into his teacup, slow and warm.  Dany plops down on the mattress and scoots forward until she’s nestled between them like some kind of hellish lapdog, flipping her tail across Erik’s legs and resting her head on Charles’ thigh with a soft, contented sigh.

Erik can empathize, he thinks, as he absently starts to pet her while watching Charles sip at his tea, their minds lazily linked like loosely twined fingers, because if there are a lot of things he’s learned to like, then Charles Xavier and all his quirks is someone he’s certainly found easy to love.

 

X

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cover for "Epoch!" by Pangea](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5640271) by [RunawayMarbles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RunawayMarbles/pseuds/RunawayMarbles)




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